Chantal Delsol: Prosperity and Torment in France: The Paradox of the Democratic Age. Andrew Kelley translation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2025.
For many years, Professor James Miller of the New School for Social Research taught a course titled “Democracy and Its Discontents,” a play on Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. Chantal Delsol, who teaches philosophy at the University of Marne-la-Vallée, wants to understand the distinctively French way of experiencing discontent in modern democracy—torment amidst prosperity. That democratic republicanism, and that prosperity, seemed triumphant in what the French retrospectively call the “Thirty Glorious Years,” 1945-1975, the decades roughly and not accidentally coinciding with the political career of Charles de Gaulle, statesman of la grandeur. Since then, however, France has been “a depressed country,” despite the fact that “it is so good to live in France,” with its ample social expenditures, its security against foreign attack (nearly unprecedented in its history), its “time-honored and moving monuments” untouched by iconoclastic (im)moralists, and its natural beauty. This paradoxical “malaise” of the French comes from a national “propensity to expect perfection here below—the habit of the ideologue.” Unfortunately, those who expect perfection take good fortune as bad. Nothing seems grand to them.
Undoubtedly so, and de Gaulle himself sharply distinguished La France from les françaises. Democratization among the European nations has led if not simply to globalization at least to Europeanization, to the sentiment that we Europeans are “without relations to any particular group,” residents of countries without borders. Delsol has her doubts about this. “On the contrary,” she insists, “each of us is tied to a homeland, one that he likes with his heart and not just with his mind,” “a particular culture, a history, and a geography.” And this particularity is in fact general, indeed natural—that is, “we humans are made in such a way that the atmosphere of our existence conditions that existence itself.” This gives the homeland a moral claim upon the individuals who live there, but if, simultaneously, “the individual man is dignified,” indeed “sacred according to our beliefs” (rooted in Christianity, even if ‘post-Christian’), ‘we moderns’ hesitate to sacrifice individuals for the sake of the homeland’s survival in freedom—this, very much in contrast with ‘the ancients.’ And even old Cicero saw what Lincoln saw: that the homeland can last only “as long as successive individuals would like it to and would like to protect it.” Do the French still want to sustain France, now that France “finds itself given a ranking” among the world’s homelands “that is now mediocre and ordinary”? Despite de Gaulle’s best efforts, “no one can doubt” “this diminution” any longer. And even grandeur itself “does not get good press” these days, in the democratized and ever-democratizing West. “In our epoch of gentleness and of victimization, one no longer boasts about power, even if it is in the past.”
Beyond power, there are regimes. “France identifies with its republican state like Russia identifies with its empire or the United States identifies with its freedom.” But in today’s France, “the republican state is losing its substance and is beginning to look like the other neighboring states.” The France that once boasted of being “the eldest daughter of the church” in Europe, recalling the baptism of King Clovis in 496, still “boasts of being the eldest daughter of the revolution,” recalling the French Revolution, which “elevated the Rights of Man into universal principles” in the course of abolishing both the remnants of feudal hierarchy and the reigning statist monarchy. But what is ‘exceptionalism’ in a democratized world in which such a claim spurs only resentment and scorn?
Delsol observes that the Americans were the ones who founded not only a federal republic, a government representing both its constituent states and its people as a whole, but the first modern democracy. She distinguishes republicanism from democracy, in a rather different way than James Madison famously did in the tenth Federalist. Madison defined democracy as a political regime in which the many who are poor (if independent) rule directly, assembling together in one place to do so, whereas republicanism is a regime in which the people elect representatives who assemble in one place to govern the people who elected them. Delsol calls democracy “an anthropology” that “supposes, rightly or wrongly, that all the adults in the city are capable of thinking and expressing the common good”; a republic is “an ideal of communion, which is quite a different thing.” Republics were “invented in ancient, holistic societies”; they are consistent with the “communal and consolidated form” of such societies; therefore, they stand in tension with “modern individualism.” In modernity, republicanism needed to be ‘reinvented.’ French republicanism was founded with the famous slogan, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’: individual liberty, equality of individuals, and the attempt to establish something like ancient communitarianism in a large, centralized state. “The French, Jacobin republican ideal would have it that the welfare state gives to each person what each needs,” as if France were one big family. This means distribution of material goods but also “spiritual” bonds, shared “communal beliefs.” In modernity as in antiquity, when those bonds weaken, “barbarity appears,” as it did with the Romans, who called it negligentia, “neg-ligence,” “the indifference about, and the disappropriation of bonds,” the spiritual ligatures of civil society. These ligatures can only weaken as the civil and political society expands its territory and population; “one cannot be a friend to all of humanity.” Arguing along the lines drawn two centuries ago by Benjamin Constant, she observes that “the ancients were able to speak of a ‘civic friendship’ only because of the small size of cities, which still were able to appear as large families.” Large modern states attempt to replace civic friendship with compassion, “which has no limits.” But that is not the same thing. “Civic friendship is a virtue, one that consists in having the common good come before one’s own particular interest,” whereas compassion is a sentiment, “a vague lacrimation” insufficiently stern to defend a republic. Whereas “authoritarian” regimes force citizens “to favor the common good” as the regime defines it, republics assume that people will do so freely. Increasingly, they do not: “the republic is hardly compatible with modern individualism,” with societies less civil than before, where “each person” puts on headphones “to listen to their own music in public places without bothering others.” Such demi-citizens “accept less than ever that all must live in harmony,” and if so, “the republican model is probably obsolete.”
In France, “the contradiction between the republican ideal and the importance of individual wills produces disastrous effects” because it remains “powerful in minds and hearts” but no longer wields the “capacities for [its] fulfillment.” Accordingly, ” a process of unfulfillment is at work,” seen most obviously in the schools, where democratic-republican equality is preached but not practiced, where the virtues needed to uphold republican fraternity no longer prevail in the face of the individualism of administrators, faculty, and students alike. “Is the society inaugurated by Jean Bodin still viable in the era of mobile phones?” The question answers itself. Yet when the ‘country of the [socialist] revolution,’ the Soviet Union, collapsed, ruining the model for many socialists in the West, “the socialist ideal [was] immediately replaced by the resurgence of the republican ideal” in France—communalism in another form. But French republicanism retained the universalism of socialist ideology, its claim “to work for the entirety of humanity and not for a particular group of people.” Insofar as communal republicanism is practicable, it flourishes in societies small enough for citizens to know one another. Modern states have long surpassed that limit. Consequently, “the republican ideal, after having replaced the socialist ideal, in turn, withers in disappointment.” It is not, as per Marx and Lenin, the state that withers away; it is the regime. This is what has led to the mood swings of the French—euphoria one minute, “great bitterness” the next. The sobriety, the common sense, of Madisonian statesmanship makes no sense to them, while Gaullist grandeur seems vacuous, inflated.
As for modern, individualistic democracy, it wants liberty, it ‘celebrates our differences,’ as the saying goes, but it also loves social equality, “and French people are wild about equality.” Delsol remarks, succinctly: “Another contradiction.” In terms of political institutions, democracy’s hostility toward oligarchy and its ruling bodies “intermediate” between the central state and the people readily inclines the French towards Bonapartism, “a French variant of enlightened despotism” wherein “a direct alliance of the supreme chief (be it the king or the president)” prevails. “France prefers monism to pluralism because it fears above all diminutive, nepotistic, unjust, irksome authorities—but it especially thinks that the entire earth must adopt monism, and here you have a form of dogmatism.” With this, a dilemma arises. “Napoleonic discourse re-creates everywhere other entitlements, other hierarchies, and other fortunes”—a “nomenklatura.” This occurs thanks to a lack of foresight, of prudence, the failure to consider, first, that a centralized modern state powerful enough to enforce equality must itself deny equality by its very existence as the pounder-down of inequalities and, second, the failure to recognize that no political problem can be ‘solved’ in the manner of a mathematical puzzle, only meliorated by thought that has been sobered by “trial and error.”
Delsol understandably associates Bonapartism with de Gaulle, who “hated political parties” and “wanted a direct agreement between himself and the people,” which she regards as “the beginning of tyranny.” “De Gaulle hated political parties because they represented diverse opinions about the definition of the common good, which he alone wanted to be the one to designate.” She calls him a “Maurrassian” on this account. [1] This overlooks de Gaulle’s own decidedly mixed evaluation of Napoleon, seen in La France et son armée, in which de Gaulle admires the Emperor’s grandeur while criticizing his ambition, which lacked the indispensable Gaullist (and classical) virtue, mesure. This also overlooks the substance of de Gaulle’s critique of the parties—they represented interest groups and therefore rendered themselves incapable of defending France as a whole in a dangerous world. And it overlooks what de Gaulle hoped would be the capstone of his founding, the revivification of federalism in France; in fact, de Gaulle’s resigned the presidency when voters rejected his proposal to do that, expressing precisely the hostility towards intermediary ruling bodies Delsol has duly noted. She is closer to the mark when she identifies President Emmanuel Macron as a statist, albeit in a technocratic mode alien to de Gaulle’s classicism. Macron “wants to embrace everything and especially not to have adversaries,” a characteristic of “monistic power” or “enlightened despotism” and “a rejection of the principle of uncertainty on which democracy is based.” The dislike of adversarial relations bespeaks an avoidance of dialogue, of debate; to call it democracy, as Macron prefers to do, “is hypocritical; one uses democracy so as to play against it.” “Such a system does not lead to a peaceful alternation” of one ruling party giving way to another, “but to a war of all against all.” That is to say that “whereas Democracy in America had been a true revelation about the democratic system, The Old Regime and the Revolution is a true revelation about France.” The revolution revolutionized the ruling persons and ruling offices of France while leaving “the French spirit,” the French character or ethos, unmoved. “The revolution, whose spirit would be propagated throughout Europe, bursts on the scene first in France because the Old Regime had already erected the outlines of it” by fatally weakening the ‘aristocracy’ or oligarchy and replacing it with a centralized administrative state. Civil liberties “were abolished on a regular basis by the king, who not long after resold them to his beneficiaries.” In a regime that buys and sells liberties, what value do liberties really have, beyond status and cash? “For centuries and even today, a private French company could never be permitted to do what the French state does for example, when it repays its creditors with massive delays, and, to be honest, only when it feels like doing so.” Under state centralization, “the government took the place of God the Father,” holding, in its decidedly secularized providentialism, the lives, fortunes, and honor of its subjects firmly in its grasp while leaving them “the freedom to squabble perpetually about metaphysical questions, which they will not forsake”—forming the French “into inveterate pontificators on all matters that have no reality.” This is what comes from the belief that liberty is “a generous gift from an authority, and not an independent capacity that one would develop opposite it and against it.” It is true that centralization may have been necessitated to united what is now France, but what began as a concatenation of provinces and languages, an “excessive diversity that forced kings to centralize in order to unite” for the sake of defending themselves and the people. And while there have been attempts to move toward a degree of regionalization, they amount only to more localized bureaucracies, as the ‘spirit of the city,’ political life, has had no place in France for a very long time. Throughout the nineteenth century, with Napoleon still remembered by people who were alive in his time, French debates over liberalism inclined toward anarchism, communism, and libertarianism; among the intellectuals, Tocqueville was a rare defender of liberal democracy. The country whose intellectuals valorized liberalism and federalism was Germany, whose tradition of political writings stemmed not from Bodin but Althusius, and although the politicians followed Bismarck, pioneer of the welfare state, then Wilhelm II, then Hitler in a vertiginous descent, today Germany at least calls itself a federal republic under the motto, “Man is older than the state.”
Delsol encapsulates the French condition nicely by observing that its welfare state is maternal. It takes care of its demi-citizens. “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, which was symbolic at first, then real, but subsequently it coalesced around the symbol of Marianne, the mother of the republic.” In practice, this “means the state helps me, the more my initiative diminishes, and the more my initiative diminishes, the more I need the state.” Mama’s boys and girls never grow up.
As for those who obtain state jobs, they satisfy “the French passion for positions of status,” a passion “as old as France itself,” beginning with its aristocracy. The French Revolution beheaded many of the titled aristocrats, replacing them with a new elite: “the ambition of every upstanding member of the bourgeoisie in France was not to become a somebody and make a fortune in business, but to be able to buy a ‘position.'” After that, purchase was replaced by competitive exams, as in China—which is why the French call their top bureaucrats ‘mandarins.’ In the United States, the Tammany Hall ward heeler George Washington Plunkitt warned that civil service reform would destroy patriotism, but not so in France. [2] “Having become an agent of the state, especially at the higher levels, the elite republican citizen nurtures a true love for France,” “serv[ing] it with all his heart.” The only rival to his patriotism is contempt for commerce: “A functionary of the republic is convinced that the private sector is filled with greedy people who think only about money and acquire it by any means possible, whereas he is a poor and virtuous man dedicated only to the common good,” a public servant surrounded by a barnyard full of swine that, if not properly supervised, might at any moment stampede over a cliff.
The problem is that “a society where there are only annuities does not work.” One-third of those employed in France are in government. Apart from its creeping economic sclerosis, this society cannot tell itself the truth about itself. Socrates would say it lacks self-knowledge, but there is little danger of any Socratic soul attracting sufficient attention to warrant capital punishment. “In egalitarian, and thus unrealistic, systems, the elites…always end up simultaneously lying to themselves and exempting themselves from the common condition,” protecting themselves from attack by carrying an ideological shield. “The French national education system, this great drunken vessel,” defends itself at the tavern of public opinion with ideological formulas, pretending that it treats elite families and disadvantaged families equally. Instead of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, the real France practices Envy, sham Equality, and Mistrust.
Delsol identifies the “anthropological presuppositions” of the French regime. First, elites assume that “subjects are incapable of managing their own affairs without the help of a public authority,” being both venal and incompetent. Second, personal honor, “not to lose face” but “to receive the consideration that is due to you,” continues to animate French souls, a “legacy of the monarchical and aristocratic world.” Those presuppositions foster envy. Third, and contradictorily, the French “clearly prefer equality to liberty”; “their sense of equality extends to egalitarianism,” a spirit that “leads to individualism and materialism” and away from the civic spirit. Egalitarianism and envy ally in the French preference for “state subsidies…over individual generosity,” the anonymity of monies doled out by faceless bureaucrats being less humiliating than anything received by a known benefactor. When fire destroyed part of the Notre Dame cathedral, “French public opinion was concerned only with one thing: preventing patron of the arts from gaining notoriety from their gesture” of financial contribution, “disparaging their generosity, and making them appear like vultures chasing after glory.” No wonder “French society is a society in which mistrust erupts with every step.” Delsol quotes de Gaulle: in France, “each person has a feeling for what he lacks rather than what he has.” Delsol adds that some of this mistrust is justified, as “statism dries up competition and favors corruption.” And so, as the great French novelists rightly describe it, in France “Parisians despise; people in the provinces envy.” Foreigners have not overlooked this, as when Heinrich Heine came through in 1834, conjecturing that the women of the provinces “perhaps seek in Catholicism a consolation for the grief of not being able to live in Paris.”
French intellectuals exhibit the quintessence of Frenchness, producing the finest idols paraded through the cave. “The prestige of the French intellectual begins at the very moment in which the prestige of the clergy fades,” with clerical censorship weakening. As Tocqueville argues, the monarchic, centralized state under the Bourbons had barred the French from obtaining political experience, leaving them prey to utopianism. (Delsol remarks that Solzhenitsyn sees the same thing in Russia.) It is no coincidence that the writer who coined the term ‘ideology’ was a Frenchman, Destutt de Tracy, and that France’s Saint-Simon wanted “to turn intellectuals into a new clergy capable of implementing a politics guided by science,” or that Comte, Fourier, and Proudhon defended autocratic utopias they expected to see realized. And “starting at the dawn of the twentieth century, the majority of French intellectuals sided either with fascism or with communism,” and indeed “it will be remembered that Lenin and Trotsky constantly compared their actions to those of the protagonists of 1789.” Worse still, some of the ideological tyrants themselves were educated in France, the bloodiest of all being Pol Pot, with Ho Chi Minh in his train, when it came to mass murder.
Aside from egalitarianism and statism, the French ideology has redefined liberty as historical progress toward, well, egalitarianism and statism. Both the Left and the Right put their polemics in historicist terms, with the Right differing from the Left mostly with respect to the pace that such progress should take. At the extremes, “both use terror to succeed, because in both cases, it is a question of impossible projects, the work of mad scientists. No one can set the past in stone, no one can remake humanity from the ground up,” starting with the French revolutionaries’ “Year Zero.” That hasn’t stopped ideologues from trying. And even after the fall of Soviet communism, as intellectuals “abandoned their lingering Marxism,” they “are not yet liberals,” as the examples of Foucault and Derrida so decisively prove. Economic and political realities, not a change in “fundamental beliefs,” pushed the intellectuals to these adjustments, rather along the lines of the Ptolemaists who invented ever-elaborate ‘epicycles’ in their defenses against Copernicans.
The abandonment of the intellectuals and their ideologies by the working classes was prefigured, oddly enough, by the experience of Lenin in Russia. When “Lenin came to power, he was convinced of having the people on his side.” He “proclaimed democracy and played along, only to discover very quickly that, while hopes for the downfall of the [czarist] regime were well shared among the population, opinions about the positive goals to be pursued differed.” And so was born the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ defined as the dictatorship of the ‘party of the proletariat,’ defined as the dictatorship of Lenin. Today, with globalization seeing the rise of international elites and nationalist populism, “the two classes that confront one another are no longer the bourgeoisie and proletariat…but the nomadic and the sedentary.” “The French upper classes are, thus, as uninterested in France as he eighteenth-century nobles who spent their lives at the court of Versailles were in their provinces,” where their estates were. The upper classes simply cannot see why anyone would oppose immigration; why, they emigrate all the time.
The secularism of French intellectuals contrasts to a significant degree to that seen in Protestant countries, where the Enlightenment was “rooted in religion” or at least outwardly respectful of it. But French Catholicism “vigorously rejected this modernity” in the eighteenth and even “throughout the nineteenth century.” “For France, Enlightenment was tantamount to atheism,” a stance taken openly by Voltaire and many others. The ‘eldest daughter of the church,’ France is “also the eldest daughter of an atheistic and ideological revolution,” a “fight against Christianity.” Even “with the hundreds of millions of deaths of the twentieth century that are due to two atheistic ideologies, France still considers religion to be the real villain of history.” And while the French do not prohibit religious practice, “it is hounded ironically.” Except for Islamic practice, its practitioners feared.
As for Catholicism, Delsol observes that “the first half of the twentieth century in France was dominated by the thought of Charles Maurras,” whose “thought actually contributed to the toppling of the religion that it claimed to serve.” Maurras wasn’t actually a Catholic at all. He was an agnostic who regarded religion in the manner Machiavelli did: as “an instrument through which power is bolstered by means of the moral and behavioral discipline that it encourages.” The battle against the anti-liberal, anti-democratic Right in the Second World War wrecked the prestige of Maurrasisme, to the advantage of Marxism, “while Catholicism suffered terribly.” Indeed, “Marx and Lacan were studied in seminaries instead of Saint Thomas Aquinas” by seminarians who dreamed of ‘walking part-way with Marxism,’ as the contemporary slogan had it. Today, however, many children of the Baby Boomers have turned to a genuine form of Catholicism; “their religion is anything but sociological.” And these are not the peasants, formerly the most religious among the French; they are scions of “the most educated families,” and “an elite is forming in this crucible.” Beyond Islam and Catholicism, however, what is now “spreading the most” are the cultic religions—the neopagan worship of Gaia, an instance of the pantheism Tocqueville foresaw as the result of democracy. “The new religious conflicts are between the supporters of transcendence and those of paganism”; “ecology is unquestionably the great religion of the coming century.” What is more, one-third of young Muslims prefer Sharia law to French law, and the allegiance of young Catholics to republicanism may not be very ardent. “The United States manages to federate diverse cultures through pride in being American and saluting a common flag. It is necessary to have a link between differences, without which the whole will crumble.” France has no such link.
Can European unity come to the rescue? Not easily. With or without Muslims (and it is not without them), Europe consists of diverse populations. Language, history, customs divide those populations. Any unified Europe would need to be a federation, a structure of rule informed by the principle of subsidiarity. That principle “pertains primarily to a belief (it is not proven!) that human individuals have a true need to guide their own actions according to their own decisions, even if this means losing efficiency” and the “comfort” efficiency can ensure. Subsidiarity would put local governments “in charge of the public good—and that is not at all French.” When Jacques Delors became president of the European Commission, he ‘solved’ the problem by building a centralized bureaucracy and calling it federal. Once you “use subsidiarity as a pretext for Jacobinism, all you have to do is declare the inadequacy” of the local powers and put the central government in charge of all important matters. Delors was so bold as to say, in a 1999 speech at the Strasbourg Cathedral, that Europe is “a structure with a technocratic feel, progressing under the aegis of a type of gentle and enlightened despotism”—exactly the form of despotism Tocqueville had predicted, a century and a half before.
Meanwhile, “this republican country, haunted by the idea of its unity, is in the process of crumbling into multiple communities that contradict and stand as an insult to its plan,” while it continues to resist European integration, which would cinch in that multiplicity, stripping off the comforting ideological blanket of French unity. While France has in fact integrating many immigrant groups—Poles, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese—these peoples were Catholic. “The question” of how to integrate, how to assimilate such foreigners “became a conundrum when it was necessary to receive Arab-Muslims, who were endowed with a religion, a language, and a culture wholly different from ours.” Technocracy, “built only through the elimination of previous cultural references and the creations of abstractions,” the “deliberate erasure of Europe’s Christian roots,” their replacement by “globalism, multiculturalism, individualism, and unlimited emancipation” (including same-sex ‘marriage’), is the latest attempt to answer the question. Muslims aren’t buying it.
And so, “the French are troubled to see their model,” republicanism, “being erased, with, moreover, the complicity of their elite.” “Since the revolution of 1789, France has been submerged in ideology, first Jacobin, then socialist, and then Marxist. It has literally been permeated with the expectation of a brighter future. This lost hope gives way to a great, bemused emptiness—but for all of this, a lack of realism has not disappeared…. French unhappiness stems from our ideological passion,” which has retarded the development of “common sense.”
Note
- For a discussion of Maurras, see “The Monarchist Kulturkampf of Charles Maurras,” on this website under the category, “Nations.”
- See “The Reformer of Tammany Hall,” on this website under the category, “American Politics.”
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