Tzetan Todorov: The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. Richard Howard translation. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999 [1982].

 

“My subject,” Todorov announces, is “the discovery self makes of other“—a sure sign of a postmodern-all-too-postmodern exercise. Whereas moderns treat the soul as a ‘self,’ with ‘self’ (rather than God or polis) as the locus of human life, postmodernists treat ‘self’ and non-‘self’ or ‘other’ as that locus, making much of ‘intersubjectivity’ in an effort to undermine ‘bourgeois individualism,’ ‘Lockean liberalism,’ and other such putative horrors. The good news is that Todorov is at core a sensible, honest Bulgarian, albeit one who lives in France and writes in French. He has “chosen to narrate a history” of the Spanish conquest of the Caribbean islands and Aztec Mexico but admits that his “main interest is less a historian’s than a moralist’s; the present is more important to me than the past.”  He wants the story to be “as true a possible but in telling [it] I shall try never to lose sight of what biblical exegesis used to call its tropological or ethical meaning.” We remain ‘selves’ encountering ‘others,’ and this old story, retold in today’s terms, may teach us a thing or two.

Why this story, among so many other possible stories? First, because “the discovery of America, or of the Americans, is certainly the most astonishing encounter of our”—our Europeans’—long “history,” Europeans having more or less always known something of “the existence of Africa, India, or China,” which share with them the same land mass.  What is more, that encounter resulted in “the greatest genocide in human history,” genocide being defined by Todorov not simply as mass homicide or intentional murder but as that in addition to millions of unintended deaths resulting from disease. Finally, Columbus’s expedition and the ensuing conquest serves as the archē, the formative beginning, of modernity, of ‘Europeanness’ as Europeans, and indeed the rest of the world, now live it. “Since that date,” 1492, “the world has shrunk”; “men have discovered the totality of which they are a part, whereas hitherto they formed a 0part without a whole.” The world shrank because technology shrank it, beginning with Spanish galleons and cannons. 

Not that Columbus himself could be described as a modern man. He set out to find gold, a decidedly traditional motive, in China, where he hoped to meet the Emperor and spread Christianity. “The universal victory of Christianity—this is the motive that animates Columbus, a profoundly pious man (he never sets sail on Sunday), who for this very reason regards himself as chosen, as charged with a divine mission, and who sees divine intervention everywhere, in the movement of the waves as in the wreck of his ship (on a Christmas night!).” Even his desire for gold has a pious aim, to fund the reconquest of Jerusalem for Christianity. “The project of the crusades had been abandoned since the Middle Ages,” but not for long, if Columbus can help it. “The man who was to give birth to a new world could not yet belong to it.”

Columbus was rightly convinced he had discovered a new continent, for three reasons: “the abundance of fresh water; the authority of the sacred books; the opinion of other men he has met with.” Natural, divine, human: the elements of his interpretation of what he had found corresponded to his motives: “a delight in nature,” love of God, desire for wealth. His beliefs “influence his interpretations,” as he not only sees the Amerindians through Biblical eyes (they are pagans, the Christian equivalent of gentiles in Israelite eyes), but through the eyes of classical antiquity, as well. The New World has “Cyclopes and mermaids, in Amazons and men with tails.” The mermaids disappoint him, as “they were not as beautiful as they are painted, for they had something masculine in the countenance.” That is, rather as Christian exegetes see anticipations of Christ in the Old Testament, Columbus understands the New World in light of Scripture and of the scripts of antiquity, including those that record the Homeric epics and stories related by Herodotus. This doesn’t stop him from accurate perception of nature when it counts. He navigates by the stars and predicts the weather; he even uses his ‘philosophic’ knowledge politically, threatening “to steal the moon” from recalcitrant Indians and making good on his threat when the lunar eclipse he expected began, winning their obedience. And he also delights in nature, in its beauty; for him the tropiques are not triste but full of color and intricate harmonies. 

Adam-like, he gives names to the things he discovers. According to one Spanish chronicler, Columbus’s own, name, Cristobal or Christum Ferens means “the bearer of Christ, and it was thus that he often signed his name.” His surname, Colón, means “repopulator,” and the chronicler thinks it “befits this man, in that he was the first to bring the people of Spain (albeit not as they should have been) to found colonies, or new populations, which, being established amid the original inhabitants…should constitute a new…Christian Church and a happy republic.” Names should fit persons and things. Todorov observes that “the first Gesture Columbus makes upon contact with the newly discovered lands is an at of extended nomination: this is the declaration according to which these lands are henceforth part of the Kingdom of Spain.” Naming presumes authority, as God Himself bestows names and bestows the authority to name the lesser creations upon the first Man. 

Todorov cautions that this authoritative naming occludes “the entire dimension of intersubjectivity,” inasmuch as to name a fellow human being (at least, one who is not an infant) presumes the right to rule an adult person while also ignoring “the arbitrary character of signs.” In naming, have you really understood the thing you have named, or have you only imposed a meaning upon it? This can extend even to translation, as when Columbus learns the Indian word cacique and simply wants to know “what Spanish word it corresponds to.” “Not for a moment does Columbus doubt that the Indians distinguish, as the Spaniards do, between nobleman, governor, and judge; his curiosity, quite limited moreover, bears only on the exact Indian equivalent for these terms.” He “does not succeed in his human communications” with the Indians “because he is not interested in them” as persons, only as subjects, and subjects not in the sense of fellow human ‘selves’ but as political subjects, rightful underlings.

Well, maybe. If Columbus wants to convert the Indians to Christianity, does he not understand them as human beings with souls that need such conversion? Even if they are “part of the landscape” (and in a sense they are—integrated within it), they are not only part of the landscape, even in his eyes. He is astonished by their nakedness, in which they resemble animals, they seem to him spiritually naked, too, having no apparent religion, not even idolatry. They are innocent of money, giving no evidence of thinking in terms of private property, so they lack the sin of covetousness, rather as Rousseau later conceived of the way of life of “noble” savages. So, as Todorov next sees, Columbus does understand them as human, with certain natural or prelapsarian virtues, but as defective humans, spiritually deprived and hence in need of subjection—conscious subjection, ultimately, to the God they do not know but immediately to the Spaniards who bring them the Word of that God. “What is denied,” Todorov laments, in full ‘postmodernist’ mode, “is the existence of a human substance truly other, something capable of being not merely an imperfect state of oneself.” That is, Columbus wants to assimilate the Indians, for both his and their own good, and for the glory of God, His Church, and the Spanish Crown. “There is never a justification of this desire to make the Indians adopt the Spanish customs,” to “propagate the Gospel”; its rightness is “self-evident.” 

This sets up an exchange of sorts, “a certain equilibrium,” as “the Spaniards give religion and take gold.” Todorov objects, despite the fact that a Christian would regard this exchange as eminently liberal on the Spanish (well, Christian) side, salvation being infinitely more valuable than material wealth. “To propagate the faith presupposes that the Indians are considered his equals (before God).” But what if they are unwilling to give their wealth, to make the exchange? “Then they must be subdued, in military and political terms, so that it may be taken from them by force”—treated, “from the human perspective this time, in a position of inequality,” of inferiority. The danger in practice is this: “By gradual stages, Columbus will shift from assimilationism, which implied an equality of principle, to an ideology of enslavement, and hence to the assertion of the Indians’ inferiority.” That is, he shifts from what Aristotle classifies as parental rule, rule for the good of the ruled, to masterly rule, rule for the good (or supposed good) of the master. Columbus himself sees the problem and moves to meet it, distinguishing Indians who practice cannibalism from those who do not, Indians who are peaceful (“submitting to his power”) from bellicose Indians who thereby deserve to be punished. Todorov isn’t satisfied: “There is no middle path” in Columbus’s thinking, no middling way of life between good and bad Indians. In Christianity, you are either on the way of life leading to salvation, the straight and narrow way, or you are on the crooked way to Hell. If you then conceive of the Christian Church as the bearer of the Holy Spirit, you should work by the means of the Holy Spirit, by persuasion, except that at times even the Holy Spirit exercises force, knocking the unthinking non-Christian off his horse as he heads along the road not to Jerusalem but Damascus. Although God can make such distinctions, human beings may well blur them, doing horrific injury to one another in their mistaken assumption of Godlike wisdom.

Todorov sees much of that confusion of the Holy Spirit with the Will to Power in the conquistadors who followed Columbus. How, he asks, in the years 1519 to 1521, did Hernando Cortés, with only a few hundred men under his command, defeat the great Montezuma, who had several hundred thousand? (Four centuries later, Europeans would wonder the same thing about General Zachary Taylor and his more or less unimpeded march to Mexico City.) It turns out that Cortés acted as a Roman would have done, not even dividing and conquering but conquering an already divided Amerindian population, a concatenation of tribal societies incapable of uniting under one commander. What is more, just as many of the regions within nineteenth-century Mexico had little love for the central government in the capital, so “the Indians in the regions Cortés first passed through are not more impressed by his imperialist intentions because they have already been conquered and colonized—by the Aztecs.” “Cortés often appears to them as a lesser evil, as a liberator, so to speak, who permits them to throw off the yoke of a tyranny especially detestable because so close at hand.” Even if the Spaniards burn the Indians’ book in order “to wipe out their religion,” are they any worse than the Aztecs, who had done the same things a hundred years before? In both cases, the attacks on religious writings and holy places may have played a larger role in the conquests than military force and disease.

The religious beliefs of the Indians themselves contributed to their own conquest by the Spaniards. Like Christians, they “devoted a great part of their time and their powers to the interpretation of messages,” but in their case they understood time itself, and the messages conveyed over time, in an entirely different way. To them, divination was the perception of cyclical patterns—much like the astrology which predated Biblical prophecy in most parts of the world and persists to this day among those still resistant to Biblical patterns of thought. The Aztec calendar consisted of recurrent months and days, as ours do, but each day “possesses its own character, propitious or unlucky, which is transmitted to actions performed on that day and even more to the persons born on it.” As with astrology, “to know someone’s birthday is to know his fate.” Any deviation from this pattern betokens an omen, usually an ill omen, a malign supernatural intervention. “The world is from the start posited as overdetermined”; “the key word of Mesoamerican society is order,” and order confirmed by rituals, rites. One Spanish observer wrote, “The good order was such that no one dared to interfere with another’s job or express an opinion, since he would be rebuffed immediately.” Even the persons selected for ritual sacrifice “accept[ed] their lot, if not with joy, in any case without despair”; “the same is true of soldiers on the battlefield,” who believed, like those sacrificed at the temples, that “their blood will help keep society alive.” “No one’s life is ever an open and indeterminate field, to be shaped by an individual free will, but rather the realization of an order always preordained.” 

This being so, when Montezuma learned of the unprecedented, omen-laden event of the arrival of the Spaniards, he consulted wizards and necromancers, relying on the gods to explain this phenomenon and to tell him what to do. “The identity of the Spaniards is so different, their behavior to such a degree unforeseeable, that the whole system of communication is upset, and the Aztecs no longer succeed precisely where they had previously excelled: in gathering information,” in knowing how the gods had ordered the world. They were spiritually paralyzed. Must these white-skinned beings not be gods? True, Columbus believed that his voyage of Christian conquest was foretold in Holy Scripture, designed by Providence, but what Providence provides is victory over those lacking the understanding that time is linear, not cyclical. In the Biblical account, events which occur in time point back to God’s founding of human life and forward toward His refounding of that life under Christ, His Son. The impressive attention to education seen in both peoples, families’ care for the intellectual nurturing of their children, led in opposite directions. The Aztec regime had two types of schools, one in which students were prepared for the warrior’s way of life, the other that prepared them for what we would call the ‘civilian’ ways of life, the lives of priests, judges, kings and their accessory co-rulers. The second type of school put a premium on the use of words, of “interpretation and speech, of rhetoric and hermeneutics.” To rule well was in large measure to rule well; “power demands wisdom, which is attested by the capacity to interpret.” Students who failed the tests of good speech, preeminently right interpretation, were put to death. No remedial classes for young Aztecs or the Mayans they displaced. The word for ruler, tlatoani, means the one who possesses speech (“something in the manner of our ‘dictator,'” Todorov remarks). 

In much of this, the Spaniards would concur. Neither Athens nor Jerusalem (nor Rome, nor Madrid) overlooked the power of speech. But all of those cities also had writing. The Aztecs had pictograms, only. Their visual signs were unintelligible without the “ritual discourse accompanying them.” For the Aztecs, memory could only be invested in speech and ritual actions; disrupt the symbols and the meaning of life, the way of life, vanishes. The Aztecs communicated their way of life through memories of ancestors. In conversing with them, the Spanish Christians enjoyed the advantages of both the written Word and written words, enabling them to travel far from their homeland in the service of a universal religion whose precepts and stories sustain themselves in a form at once portable in form but stable in meaning. When Cortés tells the Aztecs “how vain and foolish was their belief, for they placed their trust in idols which could not even defend themselves and were so easily overthrown,” the Aztecs “replied that they had been brought up in that belief by their fathers.” They were helpless in the face of changes imposed by men who thought not only in terms of the past but in terms of a prophesied but never-before-seen future. If time consists of the eternal return of the same, how can one understand the unprecedented? Ritualism won’t suffice to defend the regime from a regime in which religious rituals invoke not only the past in the present but the future in the past and in the present. For the Spaniards, by contrast, “the ease of their conquest” proves “the excellence of the Christian religion,” with its “infinite progression toward the final victory of the Christian spirit”—a “conception subsequently inherited by communism,” our Bulgarian refugee ominously intones. Like the communists, the Spaniards succeeded for a time in “imposing their superiority” over another regime only to destroy “their own capacity to integrate themselves into the world,” taking their conquest several bridges too far.

Unlike previous Spanish commanders in the New World, Cortés understood politics, deciding that “he will not be content with extorting gold, but must subjugate the kingdom itself.” It probably would be more just to say that he understood that both gold extraction and Christian conversion, the accomplishment of Spain’s economic and religious ends, required changing the political regimes of the Indians, which in turn required military conquest. “It is to him that we owe the invention, on the one hand, of conquest tactics, and on the other, of a policy of peacetime colonization.” Once again, Cortés has the advantage of knowing what natural philosophy has discovered rather than relying on magic. At the same time, his religion—universalist and egalitarian—will not tolerate compromise with the many gods of the Aztecs and the temples and idols devoted to them. In his anti-Christian bias, Todorov complains that “the Spaniards’ God is an auxiliary rather than a Lord, a being to be used rather than enjoyed”; this is premature Machiavellianism. (Sure enough, he writes, “Cortés’s behavior irresistibly suggests the almost contemporary teachings of Machiavelli,” who cited King Ferdinand as “a model of the ‘new prince.'” But the use of exemplary punishments, which Todorov notices and is indeed applauded by Machiavelli, was hardly a new, distinctively ‘modern’ device of rule.) The Christian God is both to be ‘used’ in the sense of prayed to, and enjoyed, and there’s no evidence that the Spaniards thought any differently. 

Although Cortés understood the Aztecs better than Montezuma understood the Spaniards, “this superior understanding does not keep the conquistadors from destroying Mexican civilization and society.” Indeed, “we suspect that destruction becomes possible precisely because of this understanding.” But “should not understanding go hand in hand with sympathy?” But, one must ask, why should it? I might understand Stalin without much sympathizing with him. Or I might sympathize with Stalin and out of that very sympathy wish to destroy the evil regime he has built and to convert the atheist to Christianity along with that. Todorov acknowledges that Cortés considered the Mexican peoples highly civilized—well-ordered, with large marketplaces, impressive buildings, and refined manners. Yet surely the Egyptians and the Babylonians were as civilized, even more civilized, than the Israelites, according to those measurements. “Cortés goes into ecstasies about the Aztec productions but does not acknowledge their makers as human individualities to be set on the same level as himself.” But he does so acknowledge them, qua human. It is their lack of Christianity and some of the decidedly un-Christian and indeed inhumane religious and dietary practices that he deplores. 

None of this commits one to endorse the conquest itself, the means by which it was effected, and especially its devastating consequences, which Todorov rightly and tellingly remarks: in 1500, 80 million people lived in the Americas but by the middle of the next century there were 10 million. In Mexico, the population dropped from 25 million to one million. “If the word genocide has ever been applied to a situation with some accuracy, this is the case”; “none of the great massacres of the twentieth century can be compared to this hecatomb.” True, but did this hideous mass of death result from massacre? That is, the term ‘genocide’ ordinarily means deliberate killing on a mass scale. Did the Spaniards intend to do that? On the contrary, “the Spaniards did not undertake a direct extermination of these millions of Indians, nor could they have done so.” The vast majority of these victims died of diseases, although Todorov is confident that the Spaniards knew how to fight bacteriological warfare they would have done so because they regarded the mass deaths of the Spanish as “proof that God is on the conquerors’ side.” That is ‘a bit of a stretch,’ as the saying goes. Europeans themselves took the same view of their own deaths when the plague struck in the Middle Ages, but that would not have justified the use of microbes in war, in their own eyes. The judgment of God is the judgment of God, and diseases were (mis)understood as God’s judgment, since they were beyond human control. 

Still, the Spaniards did murder and torture some of the Indians. “Torture is inflicted in order to discover the hiding places of treasure; human beings are exploited in order to obtain profits.” That is a fair indictment, although it fails to distinguish between mercantilism and ‘capitalism.’ With its valorization of material objects, gold being first among them, mercantilism fails to recognize humanity as the main source of the wealth of nations. Slavery does recognize that, but in the wrong way, failing to understand (quite apart from natural right) that free workers produce more than enslaved ones, over a lifetime. Worse, some of the torture-murders can only be understood as spurred by “an intrinsic pleasure in cruelty, in the fact of exerting their power over others, in the demonstration of their capacity to inflict death.” But Todorov doesn’t want to attribute this to human nature, a term he puts in scare quotes, despite his recognition that the Aztecs, too, killed, tortured, and enslaved their enemies, sacrificing 80,400 persons on one festive occasion. The difference is that in Christianity libido dominandi is a sin—arguably the original one, induced by Satan’s promise, “You shall be as gods.” Todorov sees some this, writing that for the Aztecs, “the sacrifice is performed in public and testifies to the power of the social fabric, to its mastery over the individual.” Massacre, as practiced by the Spaniards, “reveals the weakness of this same social fabric, the desuetude of the moral principles that once assured the group’s coherence” during “colonial wars waged far from the metropolitan country” and hidden from the authorities of that country.

Todorov claims that massacre bespeaks not human nature but modernity. “Far from the central government, far from royal law, all prohibitions give way, the social link, already loosened, snaps, revealing not a primitive nature, the beast sleeping in each of us, but a modern being, one with a great future in fact, restrained by no morality and inflicting death because and when he pleases,” heralding “the advent of modern times.” To believe this, one must believe that there were no massacres in antiquity. This error may indicate Todorov’s intention to make “the present more important than the past.” In fact it indicates a commitment to historicism. 

Todorov next moves to distinguish not only the “doctrine of inequality” from the doctrine “which affirms the equality of all men” but also “identity” from “difference.” To begin, he cites the Requerimiento, a document written in 1514 by the royal jurist, Palacios Rubios, narrating the history of humanity since the birth of Jesus, asserting the authority of the Catholic Church. The edict ‘required’ the Indians to place themselves under the rule of the Spanish, themselves subjects of the Church; it was to be promulgated to them, in accordance with the law of nations, although there is no evidence that the public reading was properly translated for them. If the Indians obey, “no one has the right to take them as slaves,” but if they do not obey, if they become rebels against God’s Kingdom, instantiated by Spain a just war on behalf of both kingdoms will follow. Apart from the blatant procedural injustice of this grim charade, Todorov would convict the Spanish of contradicting Christian egalitarianism with human slavery. The Spanish offer the Indians a choice “between two positions of inferiority,” namely, voluntary serfdom or involuntary slavery. “The Indians are posited as inferiors from the start, for it is the Spaniards who determine the rules of the game.”

But whose rules would Spaniards follow? Perhaps the rules of just war, as set down by the eminent theologian and jurist Francisco de Vitoria. Todorov is scarcely more impressed by those rules than he is by the Requerimiento. Vitoria cites “the natural right to society and communication,” referring to the right of persons to move outside their native country and to travel to other countries in order to trade. He limits this right when it comes to evangelizing, however, “think[ing] only of the Spaniards’ freedom to preach the Gospels to the Indians,” never of the Indians’ right to preach paganism in Spain. “Christian ‘salvation’ is an absolute value for him.” Vitoria’s rule violates the principle of reciprocity.

What about wars of regime change—specifically, wars against tyrannies that sacrifice and eat innocents? This, too, violates the principle of reciprocity, since “even if this rule were applied alike to Indians and Spaniards, it is the latter who have decided on the meaning of the word tyranny, and this is the essential thing.” Why, however, is that the essential thing? Todorov says it’s because the Spaniards decided “that human sacrifice is the consequence of tyranny, but massacre is not.” But does Vitoria say that massacre is just? He does not. Todorov has shifted from Vitorian principle to conquistador practice, and far from seamlessly.

Vitoria does say that the “barbarians” cannot govern themselves “any more than madmen or even wild beasts,” making it just to intervene “in order to exercise the rights of guardianship.” Here again, Todorov doesn’t say that this is unjust because the Indians do govern themselves (this would implicate him in relativizing cannibalism and human sacrifice); instead, he contents himself by asking who “decides what is barbarity or savagery and what is civilization,” answering, “only one of the two parties to the agreement, between whom subsists no equality or reciprocity.” Todorov denies that “one has the right to impose on others what one considers as the good, without concern as to whether or not this is also the good from the other’s point of view.” But what if one does consider this, and still regards the asserted ‘good’ of ‘the other’ as evil?

Reciprocity of rule is what Aristotle calls political rule; it should not prevail among unequals, such as parents and children or masters and natural slaves, i.e., those incapable of ruling themselves or, more precisely, those incapable of ruling themselves justly. (The eminent Spanish Aristotelian scholar, Juan Ginés Sepúlveda, made exactly that argument, comparing Spaniards to parents, Indians to children.) [1] The real question is less ‘who’ rules but the nature of the persons in the polis. If the Indians are “imperfectly human” inasmuch as they practice cannibalism, sodomy, and human sacrifice, they are surely candidates for non-political rule. The problems is rather that the Spaniards themselves are inclined to massacre them, making at least some of them unfit for rule over anyone, and that some of them misuse Christianity as an excuse for military conquest. [2] Several of them are ignorant of the Indians’ way of life, claiming that they “exercise none of the human arts or industries,” a claim that not even Cortés makes. One of them, Gonzalo Fernández de Ovidedo y Valdés, advocated genocide, offering his readers the vicious image, “Who can deny that the use of gunpowder against pagans is the burning of incense to Our Lord?” 

Todorov allows that the Spaniards were more “advanced” than the Indians in one area: technology, including not only weaponry but writing. Beyond that, their moral-political criticisms were nothing more than instances of “anti-Indian prejudice.” Among the Spanish thinkers, he prefers Bartolomé de las Casas, who rejected Aristotle for Christ, Who commanded us to love our neighbor as ourselves. For Las Casas, “All the Indians to be found [in the New World] are to be held as free: for in truth so they are, by the same right as I myself am free.” Against Aristotle, Las Casas claimed that “there is no natural difference in the creation of man” inasmuch as all possess reason and so can be “corrected” by God’s grace. Christianity, a universalist religion, “is suited to all the nations of the world,” and God has ordained that all shall receive it in the course of time. Las Casas went so far that the “gentleness and decency” of the Indians showed that they were “supremely fitted and prepared to abandon the worship of idols and to accept, province, by province and people by people, the word of God and the preaching of the truth.” Even the ease with which Spaniards defeat them in battle indicates that they incline toward Christian peaceableness. They will abandon their evil practices, if rightly taught. For Las Casas, the conquistadors are the Satanic ones. 

While Todorov prefers Las Casas, he rejects his argument, again on ‘postmodernist’ grounds: Who decides on judging the Indians by the Christian standard, other than Spanish Christians? Las Casas merely reverses the roles of Indians and Spanish, ascribing the role of the innocents to the Indians, the role of evildoers to the Spanish. “There is an incontestable generosity on the part of Las Casas, who refuses to despise others simply because they are different. But he goes one step further and adds: moreover, they are not (or will not be) indifferent. The postulate of equality involves the assertion of identity, and the second great figure of alterity, even if it is incontestably more attractive, leads to a knowledge of the other even less valid than the first.” This is because the very agapic love Las Casas bears for the Indians distorts his perception of them. “Can we really love someone if we know little or nothing of his identify; if we see, in place of that identity, a projection of ourselves or of our ideals?” The Christian answer to this question is ‘Yes.’ A human being, even a defective human being, is susceptible to the workings of divine grace; one does not need to know more than that in order to love him, Christianly. Las Casas would have the Spaniards wrest the Indians from “the power of these unnatural fathers,” the conquistadors, and brought under the rule of the husbandly—in Aristotle’s sense, the reciprocal or political rule—of the priests. This point is lost on Todorov, who equates the husband-wife relationship with the master-slave relationship. He asks, “Is there not already a violence in the conviction that one possesses the truth oneself, whereas this is not the case for others, and that one must furthermore impose that truth on those others?” Clearly not: Todorov himself evidently doesn’t regard the truth as negotiable; he would not impose what he takes to be the truth on others under normal circumstances, but he does not object to warfare under extraordinary circumstances. In a subsequent book, he has no objection whatever to the Allied response to Nazi Germany in the Second World War. But here he prefers to emphasize “the relativity of values.”

Vitoria addresses the problem of ‘who says’ a war is just by arguing that it cannot be left to fickle and manipulable public opinion but only to the wise. Wisdom requires accurate information, among other things. Although Todorov claims that Vitoria “does not envisage the possibility of the leaders’ bad faith,” he evidently does, since he regards men of bad faith as supremely unwise, at very least violators of the commandment not to lie. He also says that Vitoria relied on rumor, failing genuinely to seek the truth about the Indians. But in that case, he wasn’t really wise. He did not meet one of his own criteria for wisdom. 

Todorov would reorganize moral judgment alone three “axes.” The first is what he calls “a value judgment”: Is the person good or bad, my equal or my inferior? Second, there is a “praxeological” judgment: Do I “identify myself with him” or “impose my own image upon him”? Third, there is an “epistemic” judgement: How well do I know him? Las Casas, for example, visited Mexico, learned more about the Indians and the Spanish colonizers, concluding that the military response to the Indians “risks being worse than the disease,” namely, the Indians’ practices of cannibalism and human sacrifice. He also inclined now to minimize the disease, claiming that each human being has an intuitive knowledge of God in the sense that everyone understands that there must be someone or something “than which there is nothing better or greater”; further, men worship the god so conceived as best they can; and that the proof of living worship can be seen in whether the worshipper offers god the most precious thing, human life. Since the Indians did in fact offer human sacrifices, they were sincere if mistaken worshippers of God. Todorov applauds. Here, “equality is no longer bought at the price of identity; it is not an absolute value that we are concerned with,” as “each man has the right to approach god by the path that suits him.” More, “there is no longer a true God (ours) but a coexistence of possible universes” of belief, none more valid than another. “Las Cases has surreptitiously abandoned theology and practices here a kind of religious anthropology,” which Todorov praises as “the first step toward the abandonment of religious discourse itself.” The difficulty with this argument is that anthropology is not only non-religion but amoral. The mere observation of ‘difference’ yields no moral conclusion. If you subtract religion (and/or moral philosophy) from anthropology you get exactly zero moral guidance, since there is no justification for multiculturalism, intersubjectivity, respect for ‘the other,’ either.

Las Casas himself ended by judging the Spanish much more harshly than he judged the Indians, prophesying that God would revenge them for their bloodshed in the service greed. Todorov applies this claim to all of Europe, regarding the ongoing colonization of Europe by non-Europeans as a sort of backlash against imperial conquests, although he hastens to add that this “cannot be considered my ideal.” He would rather have all human beings “discover the other.” More interestingly, he recognizes that European attempts to assimilate the rest of the populations of the world have succeeded. “The colonized peoples have adopted our customs and have put on clothes.” This happened in part, “paradoxically,” thanks to “Europeans’ capacity to understand the other.” Montesquieu was a European, studied by Europeans. Even Cortés, as Todorov has remarked, understood the Indians better than they understood him. This is another way of saying that Europeans discovered philosophy in addition to adopting Christianity. Europeans “exhibit remarkable qualities of flexibility and improvisation which permit them all the better to impose their own way of life.” (By practicing writing rather than pictograms, a particular European technology lends itself to exactly such flexibility and improvisation.) Egalitarianism serves both colonialism and anti-colonialism. “To experience difference in equality is easier said than done.” Todorov hopes for “a dialogue of cultures.” [3] He intends to conduct this dialogue in writing, to be sure, but in the form of narrative rather than the “systematic discourse” favored by scientistic Europeans. Narrative history “can be exemplary for us because it permits us to reflect upon ourselves,” yielding self-knowledge ‘through the knowledge of the Other.”

“I do not believe that history obeys a system”—few victims of a Marxist regime would. Rather, “to become conscious of the relativity (hence of the arbitrariness) of any feature of our culture is already to shift it a little, and that history (not the science but its object) is nothing other than a series of such imperceptible shifts.” Yet one must ask: Shifts to where? What constitutes a moral “advance”?

 

Note

1. Sepúlveda cites four reasons for considering war against the Indians just: that the Indians refuse obedience to the Spaniards, whereas their “natural condition“—note well, not their nature—is “such that they should obey others”; that the “portentous crime of human flesh,” a “special offense to nature,” and “the worship of demons,” an offense against God, and human sacrifice should be abolished; that the  “numerous innocent mortals” who are sacrificed annually should be saved; and that “war on the infidels is justified because it opens the way to the propagation of Christian religion and eases the task of the missionaries.” The Spanish therefore have the duty to rule them—to, as Todorov puts it, “impose the good on others.” While admitting that some of these claims “are not far from the truth,” he nonetheless rejects them in favor of postmodern ‘intersubjectivity.’ 
2. Todorov quotes Sepúlveda quoting Augustine to the effect that the salvation of one soul is worth more than the sacrifice of many human lives—this, in support of the right to undertake massacres in the service of Christian evangelism. This is an obvious distortion of Augustine’s teaching, which would concur with the principle—one immortal soul is worth more than—any number of physical bodies—but would deny the conclusion. Only if a human being could know that God would never have converted the souls that animated those dead bodies could he put the principle into practice. “God knows,” he writes in his Epistle 34, “that I do not want anybody forced into the Catholic community against his will. My only desire is that the truth be openly proclaimed to all men who are in error, and that once it has been made manifest through my ministry and God’s assistance, it be persuasive enough om make them embrace and follow it.” More menacingly, he does grant Catholic authorities the right to physical punishment of evil men, on the grounds that they will thereby be forced to consider the error of their ways, rather as we whip a boy so that “he will learn” not to commit wrongdoing. In so dealing with heretics, Catholic authorities act as loving parents. But this is quite far from commending massacres in the name of God. 
3. He has his predecessors, a familiar example being André Malraux, whose first book, The Temptation of the West, was intended to undermine imperialism by challenging its ‘epistemological’ assumptions. And of course he titled one of his earliest novels, set in China, The Conquerors.

 

 

Raymond Aron: Aron et De Gaulle. Partie II: Le Retour de De Gaulle (1958-1959); Partie III: La Cinquième République (1960-1968). Jean-Claude Casanova, ed. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2022.

Raymond Aron: “Liberté et Égalité.” In Pierre Manent, ed.: Liberté et Égalité. Paris: EHESS, 2013.

 

France recovered economically in the 1950s, but not sufficiently to retain its empire. The French withdrew from Indochina in 1954 and from Tunisia and Morocco in 1956. Algeria remained under their control, having been settled extensively by French nationals, beginning in the 1830s. But the Arab population there had become restive, especially since the Second World War, finding organizational form in a succession of groups, culminating in the founding of the National Liberation Front in 1954. Civil war followed, and as the war went on, the Fourth Republic fought poorly. So much so, that there was danger of a military putsch led by Army colonels who had been posted in Algeria for many years, a gaggle of miniature Caesars but formidable to a weak regime. In the final volume of his War Memoirs, de Gaulle perceived “a glimmer of hope” for his return.

So did Aron, and by November 1958 it was more than a glimmer. “General de Gaulle left power voluntarily at the beginning of the year 1946, not to say farewell to politics but in the conviction that parliamentarians must eventually make appeal to him” to save the country. This had now happened, albeit twelve years later and after the failure of the RPF. For the RPF to have succeeded, de Gaulle would have needed “to consent to play the parliamentary game,” to become the leader of a party and to renounce the persona of a national hero. “He decided otherwise, and in 1958, events gave him reason.” Parliament had recalled him, giving him plenary powers to resolve the crisis.

Given the national crisis, Parliament granted him the power of a Roman dictator in his “role as of legal savior” to frame a new constitution. The legality of the role is crucial, although it can be misused in what Aron calls this “Bonapartist conjuncture” of circumstances. But Louis-Napoléon was an “adventurer,” Pétain “an old man.” De Gaulle is “an authentically great man,” one who “by his background, by his intellectual formation, had the right” to “claim the Republic.” Therefore, “the recourse to a ‘dictator’ in the Roman sense of the term, the desire, in a period of crisis, to render obedience to a power incarnated in one man, are not, in themselves, pathological phenomena.”

Today, Aron writes a non-Gaullist government not allied with the Communists is inconceivable. While the Fourth Republic has presided over a strong economic rebound, it lost the empire without being able to resolve the Algerian crisis and the regime itself continues to exhibit the characteristic defects of parliamentarism, which Aron and de Gaulle alike had never ceased to deplore. Accordingly, in writing his new constitution, de Gaulle has “obeyed precedents less than his own genius.” Given the structure of political parties in France, particularly their advocacy of different and opposing regimes, “one can find stability and efficiency in the executive neither in the British method nor in the American procedure.” In France, “the sole recourse is to reinforce the authority of the executive and to limit the action of the legislature.”

Under de Gaulle’s constitution, the president of the Republic is “not a symbol” but wields “a part of the power.” He chooses the prime minister, who is responsible before parliament, thereby linking the executive and the legislative branches while maintaining their independence from one another. The president has the power to dissolve the Assembly, to name certain civil and military officials, to submit laws to the country for a referendum vote, to negotiate treaties, and to serve as both Chief of the French State and Chief of the Community—i.e., the remaining French colonial possessions and those former possessions that choose to maintain a close relationship with France. He is elected not by Parliament but by an electoral college of 80,000 persons. 

Aron considers “none of the articles of the Constitution” to be “scandalous in itself.” “Taken together, they recall to us the constitutional monarchy or the parliamentary Empire of the milieu of the last century.” Aron worries no more about Bonapartism, as he had done in 1943, but about what will happen to the regime once de Gaulle leaves office. As the author of a book on “the industrial society” of the middle of the twentieth century, Aron also regards the Gaullist constitution as weighted to heavily in favor of rural France, “static and traditional.” And while the constitution “maintains a liberal facade,” the “regime will be, in fact, authoritarian” if not despotic-Napoleonic. Finally, he worries that a far-Right majority might take over in the Assembly, its “superpatriots” leading the regime into ill-judged “adventures.” Might de Gaulle himself fall in with their demands?

By “integrating the plebiscitary element into the democratic regime,” in the form of the referendum, “France oscillates between the anonymity of parliaments of the second order and the éclat of the charismatic leader.” “General de Gaulle is the charismatic leader par excellence, but with historic ambitions comparable to Washington”; as a genuine republican, he wants neither to prolong his ‘Roman dictatorship’ nor to use the legislature “to make his rule permanent.” Two questions nonetheless persist: What will happen with the ambitious colonels and other French “semi-fascists”? And can “the imperial will of the French” reconcile itself to “the necessities of our century,” particularly in Algeria, where the two sides are irreconcilably contradictory? Given these difficulties, a third and more fundamental question arises: “Resignation of the French, or renovation of France?”

As head of state, the president “represents the whole of France because he is foreign to the parties and superior to the faction. Since General de Gaulle is not the descendent of kings, he is in the line of leaders by acclamation.” As a “Washington, not Louis-Napoléon,” he is “the Legislator” who “has founded a Republic, not an Empire”. And in any event, “neither the First nor the Second Empire were totalitarian or fascist regimes.” But while in his status as founder, de Gaulle remains in the spirit he took on as the “leader of Fighting France” during the world war, the Gaullist members of Parliament are RPF types. De Gaulle is not identical to the Gaullists. Will the real power in this new regime belong to the President of the Republic or to the prime minister, who answers to a legislature now dominated by a coalition itself dominated by the newly-named Gaullist party, the Union for the New Republic? Only experience will tell. And after de Gaulle, who but a UNR man—not likely a great man but a party man—will take up the presidency? Can such a man defend the Fifth Republic from the remaining ‘regime’ parties? And as for the UNR deputies themselves, “antiparliamentarians in opposition, they will not necessarily be so tomorrow.” If so, parliamentarism might return after de Gaulle. True, an outrightly fascist turn seems “improbable,” as the UNR is not “a party of the masses in the style of fascism or national-socialism.” The most worrisome of the lot is the ardent advocate of Algérie française, Jacques Soustelle, but even he “appears too intelligent to misconceive the difference of the epochs and the spirit of the times.” [1] More realistically, “in future years, will the UNR become a normal party in a normalized regime?” Might it appeal to the moderate Left and the moderate Right? “It would be premature to say yes, unjust to say no.” 

The underlying problem remains in the character of the French people themselves. They want governmental stability, efficiency, and modernization, but they also want la gloire. “But glory in the twentieth century costs early and for a semi-industrial country of 45 million souls will always be semi-illusory.” Many UNR members want both a realistic policy that ushers France into “industrial civilization” and a “French Algeria.” That won’t happen. Indeed, “the political language of the French is more abstract than that of the English or the Americans,” but now that “there are no longer monarchists or Bonapartists of conviction and since everyone demands the Republic, it is by willed illusion that France takes hold of ideologies,” those abstractions, only “in order to tear them off.” While the Left remains, “perhaps, ideological, today it is defeated, it and its ideologies, perhaps more decisively than it was in 1940.”

This “erasure of the Left” has profound causes: part of the Left “obstinately remains with the Communist Party”; yet even Nikita Khruschev, the current ruler of the Soviet Union, still the ostensible leader of Communists worldwide, has criticized the “sanguinary tyrant,” Josef Stalin. As for the non-Communist Left, it is as much anti-Soviet as anti-American, and a substantial part of its program has been adopted by ‘capitalism’ itself. Finally, the French Left hasn’t succeeded in getting rid of the French empire, however much it declaims against it. The Communist Party still gets twenty percent of French votes, but “has lost its dynamism, its power to attract the youth, the intellectuals,” remaining more Stalinist than the Soviets. To revive itself, can the democratic Left effect a rapprochement with the Communists, set a firm policy on Algeria, reanimate “the old words of the socialist order (especially the notion of collective ownership of the means of production) and induce the people of today to want that? Aron thinks not.

“Compared to the Fourth Republic,” then, and compared to any of its main parties, “the Fifth appears to be a regime of our time.” With its seven-year presidential term, it features “a monarch invested by the people,” a Parliament that cannot remove him, a prime minister who “explicates the policy of the power the nation has elected.” However, French civil society may still lack the conditions that will support a “technocratic government in industrial society,” a society that accepts the rules of the game and political parties which also respect those rules. And again, if the regime does establish itself, how long will it last when de Gaulle absents himself?

It took some time before the French would find out, as de Gaulle would serve for a decade, giving Aron no shortage of topics to consider. Being an economist, Professor Casanova quite understandably includes several of Aron’s statements on the Gaullist management of France’s political economy, beginning with the 1959 budget, “a symbol and expression of another spirit” than that of the Fourth Republic. The first Gaullist budget, “inspired,” Aron writes, “by a coherent conception,” indeed by “resolution, coherence, and continuity,” subordinated expansion to equilibrium in the balance of trade. Budget imbalance was inevitable, due to the cost of the Algerian war, de Gaulle’s plans to strengthen the French military (including a nuclear weapons arsenal), and continued expenses associated with the maintenance of ties with former French colonies. “The combination of a strong State, an ambitious diplomacy, and a liberal economic practice is not in itself contradictory.” 

As years passed, however, Aron—a genuine, free-market liberal in the Adam Smith-John Stuart Mill line, although never so extreme as Bastiat—became disenchanted. On the matter of workers’ profit-sharing, which de Gaulle endorsed, Aron could only shake his head: “One man, sure of having reason against all regarding a problem whose complexity he ignores and whose gravity he misconceives, cannot put to rest the demon of pride.” Companies need profits for investment in equipment and to meet unforeseen expenses in order to achieve the expansion and modernization de Gaulle wants. They are not democracies. In fact, “the firm of our epoch is a techno-bureaucratic hierarchy.” Alert to the criticism that will come at him from both Left and Right, Aron denies that he argues this way to defend some ‘class interest;’ he insists that the self-interest of workers and of capitalists, separately or together, should not animate economic policy. “I defend, on this occasion, no other interest but that of the French economy taken as a whole.” Similarly, worker-capital association poses practical difficulties, however it may cultivate the civic spirit of the French. 

In the aftermath of the “évenèments” of May-June 1968, when the de Gaulle administration faced down a concatenation of student protests and workers’ strikes, Aron offered a critical overview of Gaullist economic policy. Given strong inflationary pressures, the franc must be devalued, since “neither the French nor the foreigners any longer know how to maintain the parity of money.” What we do know is that “a system of fixed parities, without an automatic mechanism of readjustment brings with it an intrinsic vulnerability” as economic conditions change.” For reasons of prestige (that demon of pride, again), France has attempted to redefine a crisis of the franc as a crisis of the international financial system, dominated by the Americans, and to rely upon French gold reserves as ballast against the vagaries of the fiat money—specifically, the American dollar—upon which that system relies. But, in reality, the franc eventually will need to be devalued, since “the international monetary system has no need of a fundamental revision.” De Gaulle’s policy has been to appeal to the political confidence of the moderates in the Fifth Republic generally and in his administration in particular, to adopt austerity measures, reducing the budget in order to bring prices down, and to increase exports. “Events confirm in this regard a severe lesson: the real power of a country is measured not by its gold resources but by the prosperity of the economy and by political and moral unity.” 

Since “the dollar no longer constitutes a secure refuge against the eventual devaluation of a currency,” “only one question” remains: “how long until the next crisis?” The de Gaulle administration’s tax on consumption won’t work because “the high prices do not derive from an excess of demand but from an augmentation of costs.” Although “the government…in my mind, had perfect reason to attribute to the ‘évènements of May-June’ the main responsibility for the present difficulties,” devaluation is the only way out of them. Politically, the blame for this refusal to face reality falls upon the President of the Republic, not his prime minister, since his own “constitutional doctrine” makes him responsible for “the big decisions” in all areas of policy, including finance. More broadly, France itself “has never understood the rules of authentic liberalism.” “The refusal of a necessary devaluation, between 1931 and 1936, between 1952 and 1958, caused damages to the French economy that the men now in power must never forget.” But by “never” Aron means not only in his own lifetime but from the time of the foundation of the modern state in France, to the policy of Louis XIV’s Controller-General, Jean-Baptist Colbert. Colbert advocated substantial state intervention in the economy, with heavy tariffs on foreign imports and subsidies of French industry—all with the intent of increasing treasury revenues. “The French have Colbertism in their blood.” But such dirigisme defies the laws of economics, however seductive it may be to state officials, to monarchist subjects and to republican citizens.

This notwithstanding, Gaullist economic policy by no means preoccupied Aron. He remained primarily concerned with the regime itself, persistently wondering (as he did as early as July 1959), “Does democracy have a future in France?” After all, the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Republics all failed. “What is the meaning of these failings?” In some respects, the French have been inordinately obsessed with one dimension of their regimes, the institutional structures or arrangements of ruling offices. France’s population, especially vis-à-vis a Germany united under the Hohenzollerns, and the French economy—the material foundations of all its regimes—put every regime at a disadvantage when it came to guarding the peace and prosperity of France. More, “the democratic regime” in particular “is condemned, by its essence, to not employ all the arms of power against its enemies,” instead “tolerat[ing] revolutionary opponents.” Now that the monarchist and fascist iterations of the Right and (temporarily) the extreme Left have weakened, de Gaulle has had a chance to found and more stable republican regime. Contrary to Marxist pieties, the future of democracy in France does not depend on the “class interests” of either capitalists or worker. “It is the political psyche of the nation that manifests itself in the constant instability of its institutions.”  Regrettably, “the spirit of faction seems endemic in our country” (as indeed Julius Caesar had said of the Gauls). 

“A modernized France requires a rational administration and a somewhat reasonable politics.” While the Constitution of the Fifth Republic promised more of those things than any previous republican constitution, Aron judged it to be “not viable in its present form,” given the “duality of the executive”—a powerful president along with a prime minister charged with managing relations between the executive and legislative branches—which he judges unsustainable in the long run. If party struggles and legislative deliberation can function in industrial societies, on condition that citizens understand that they need to be limited in order to allow firm policy decisions by the executive, are French elites and the masses “attached” to the procedures that will ensure such a balance? Aron doubts it. And “the combination of an executive in the style of Louis XIV and a Parliament submitted to English discipline by the will of [Prime Minister] Michel Debré is, in the long term, impossible.” Can de Gaulle govern “in cooperation with a Parliament” at all?

From time to time, but increasingly, Aron raised a modified version of the concerns he had voiced during the war. Can this regime, can any regime, “combine nearly unconditional authority of one man with respect for democratic forms and essential liberties?” According to the letter of the Constitution, de Gaulle is little more than a counselor to the government which in ordinary times is directed by the Prime Minister, who must submit to interrogation by the legislators. But in fact, “Charles de Gaulle reigns,” presiding over the Council of Ministers, communicating directly with Parliament, and submitting laws for popular referendum. This reduces the Prime Minister to the status of an American vice president, while making the government—i.e., the ministers and their staffs—subordinate to the Head of State and the Parliament, at the same time. And in France, most political and administrative personnel are “hostile to the separation of powers of the American type.” As of 1960, “the French people have given an absolute power to General de Gaulle because they await from him the end of the Algerian War,” but what happens, once he delivers on that expectation? Will he ‘dial back’ his powers, or will he foment new crises, perpetuating his extraordinary powers? 

Such crises were likely to erupt, given “the diplomacy of the Gaullist Republic.” European internationalists like Jean Monnet “suspect the ruin of their hopes”; supporters of the Atlantic Alliance anticipate “the putting into peril of the alliance that guarantees our security”; in both of these policies, “all the nations” worry that Gaullist policy will provide “an aid to the party of Moscow at the very moment when authoritarianism” in France “risks opening the voice of a popular front” because it falsely, but in the minds of the French Left seriously, raises the ghost of fascism. [2]

In the end, crisis-mongering will not suffice to maintain the Fifth Republic. “The government of modern societies is, for the most part, a prosaic task. Great politics only occupies the masters of the world a few days per year, a few hours per day.” No amount of dramatic state visits, not even the development of nuclear weapons, will “transfigure the role of France and what she represents,” whatever de Gaulle may hope. “Faithful to his traditional conceptions, he thinks in terms of diplomacy and prestige, rank and power” of nation-states, a stance which tends to weaken the international organizations and alliances that protect France in fact. He does, however, “know that nothing matters as much to his glory, to his biography, to the future of France than the safeguarding of democratic forms, the only ones adapted to the spirit of the epoch, to the nature of French society.” “Liberals who are Gaullists” continue to believe that de Gaulle “has represented a unique and exemplary exception” to the rule “posed by Montesquieu or Tocqueville,” that “no man great enough to exercise absolute power.”

Having upheld France during the war, having founded the Fifth Republic, how long will his greatness continue to serve France in the decidedly more prosaic tasks to come? And will his “traditional conceptions” of international politics suffice? In the final volume of his Mémoires de guerre, de Gaulle insists that France remains among the great powers of the world, that it must guard its borders, maintain the balance of powers in Europe and in the world at large, that states are, as Nietzsche saw, cold monsters, and so France must above all maintain its independence of action, even as it seeks a certain kind of alliance among Western European countries. He would build a greater Europe, one that can stand up once the Soviet hegemony fails in central and eastern Europe—as it must, because such a hegemony goes against the “national wills” of the countries it now dominates. Because ideology holds the Soviet hegemony together, and because in the end “alliances and enmities are determined more by national interests than by the internal regimes of the States,” a European alliance founded upon the interests of its members will eventually prevail.

Aron remained unconvinced. Because it is “to a certain degree overheated, nationalism does not favor comprehension of the other.” This is why de Gaulle mistakenly desired to dismember Germany in the 1940, only to reconcile with West Germany in 1963. Today, “has the time of la grande Europe arrived?” Probably not: Europe “from the Atlantic to the Urals” (in de Gaulle’s then-famous phrase) is an “enigmatic and grandiose” concept—dubious because Russians may not want to abandon the mineral-rich lands of Siberia, beyond the Urals. “General de Gaulle is never precise about the date in which la grande Europe will be accomplished,” but in the meantime he has excluded Great Britain from the Common Market, arguing that its economy is still too intimately tied with that of the United States. Aron doubts that an expanded Common Market and the eventual political integration of “small Europe” (i.e., Western Europe) is worth doing, given the existence of thermonuclear arms. This, he maintains, is needed in order to attain greater equality with the United States within the Atlantic Alliance, which is still indispensable for guarding European liberty. De Gaulle’s “anti-anglo-saxons” policy will result in “nothing more than a national policy, more narrow than romantic,” although it is also romantic. It may have the reverse effect of its intention by convincing other Europeans that American guidance is “less insupportable than French guidance.” In sum, as of the mid-1960s there are two questions remaining, questions which “will be given by the future in determining the final meaning of Gaullism.” They are: “is absolute national sovereignty compatible with nuclear arms? And “is the Constitution of the Fifth Republic…the model of democracy in the Industrial Age?” Aron does not necessarily answer ‘no’ to these questions, but, characteristically, neither does he answer with an unqualified ‘yes.’ 

Casanova is especially interested in Aron’s discussions of the Constitution. Aron continued unhesitatingly to concur with French opinion of 1958-59, which supported de Gaulle as the rightful ‘Dictator-Legislator’ of a France wracked by factions and misgoverned by an imbecilic parliamentary-republican regime. Subsequently, however, de Gaulle has made his founding into a project periodically renewed over the years, claiming in one press conference “that all powers, including the judiciary power, derive from the Chief of State”—an “extreme theory,” indeed, one “contrary to the principles of all liberal regimes.” “Such as it is today, the Constitution is unbalanced to the profit of the President of the Republic,” as it is “monocratic,” more or less an elective monarchy, de Gaulle having persuaded his countrymen to scrap the original electoral college in the Constitution in favor of direct election of the president by popular suffrage. Political life in “the Gaullist republic” is becoming “a succession of plebiscites.” In France today, “political stability is linked to a man, not to a Constitution,” and so the Constitution cannot become any more “deeply rooted” tomorrow than it is today. And when de Gaulle leaves the scene, he will leave the Fifth Republic without “a Constitution accepted by the whole of the nation.”

Yet, by the end of 1965, Aron admits that “the first experience of the election of the president of the republic by universal suffrage since 1848 has been, in many respects, an incontestable success.” The French people were engaged in politics, not indifferent or apathetic. “Great public problems were posed to the nation” and the candidates had equal opportunities to campaign. To the surprise of many, including Aron, de Gaulle did not win a majority on the first ballot. As head of state, de Gaulle had attempted “to appeal to every party and to incarnate the people as a whole.” But “this conception, in a democratic regime and in a normal period, is pure mythology,” as “the actual president of the Republic is elected by one party of the nation.” France simply no longer has great problems. De Gaulle “has given France years of stability and a Constitution which endeavors to prevent the return to the parliamentary games of yesterday.” Despite his withdrawal from NATO and other anti-Atlanticist moves, which might have emboldened the Soviets, “the fear of Soviet aggression has disappeared, American protection continues to be assured.” Why, then, does de Gaulle in his rhetoric transform all elections into quasi-plebiscites, thereby undermining the stability of his own Constitution with his “art of creating regime crises”? Popular election of the president transfers the authority of the executive to the principle of “majority rule, that of democracy,” not to the principle of “legitimacy, which in his own eyes general de Gaulle has incarnated since 1940.” At the same time, had the latest referendum not gone his way, de Gaulle might have invoked the Constitution’s Article 16, which allows the president to declare a state of national emergency and assume dictatorial powers. That is no way to treat a political event in ordinary times. France has no great problems left to solve, but it does have “arduous” ones: social legislation, education reform, and needed adjustments to the political economy in order to make it more competitive internationally. These are matters for normal politics, not for regime politics.

It was the educational institutions of France that proved de Gaulle’s stumbling block. Although he survived the crisis of ‘May `68,’ by calling another referendum in 1969—a worthy attempt to decentralize some of the power of the centralized French state— de Gaulle went to the proverbial well once too often. His proposal for education reform failed; wisely, he resigned rather than invoking Article 16. Aron reminds his readers, as he has had occasion to observe before, that “in politics, the French have a solidly established and well merited reputation for inconstancy.” What next? 

Will the regime devolve into something similar to the Fourth Republic, in which a “man without qualities” assumes reduced executive power? It is true that France has become centrist, but the centrists themselves are divided, even as they were in the late 1940s and early 1950s, now into the Gaullist-nationalists of the center-right and the Atlanticists of the center-left. Further, with no one of de Gaulle’s stature in the presidency, how will relations between the executive and the legislative majority work themselves out? De Gaulle “had pushed he ‘sole exercise of power’ to a point which, in reaction, a certain restoration of Parliament and a reinforcement of the authority of the Prime Minister will impose itself.” How will that go?

By June 1969, the election of the loyal and decidedly undramatic Georges Pompidou to the presidency portended the change from “plebiscitary Gaullism to institutional and electoral Gaullism.” This should work because the Left remains divided among Communists, socialists and radicals. The center held, along with the Constitution, throughout the next decade. But by 1980, Aron titled one of his essays, “The Constitution in Question.” By then, the Left had regrouped under the leadership of François Mitterrand. The Socialists had put forward a twenty-seven-point platform prior to the presidential election of spring 1981, but Aron was more concerned about a potential constitutional crisis. The election of the president by universal suffrage has worked, so long as the president enjoys a majority in Parliament, but what if the majority party differs from that of the President? If Mitterrand wins the presidency without a Socialist majority in the Assembly, that carefully articulated program will stall. Under the Constitution, the president could dissolve the Assembly, but if the Socialists fail to win the subsequent parliamentary elections he would probably need to resign. That is, “the Constitution of the Fifth Republic, as it was interpreted by the parties in power, suffered the opposite defects of those of the Third and Fourth Republics.” None of them assured “the stability of executive power,” as the parliamentary republics featured little such power to begin with and the Gaullist republic put too much responsibility in the hands of the executive, leading to the rejection of the president when things go badly. At the same time, Aron wants no part of a return to the parliamentary republics. 

Mitterrand did indeed win the presidency, then dissolved the Assembly, which came back with a large Leftist majority; the Socialists had made a rapprochement with the Communists seven years earlier, and Mitterrand put four of them into his Cabinet. In line with ‘Left’ policy in Europe at the time, Mitterrand advocated European neutrality between the two great powers while continuing France’s alliance with West Germany; given Central and East European subservience to Moscow, this was unlikely, even in Western Europe, whose citizens could not help noticing the lack of an alliance partner among the Communist countries. “Everyone imagines in his own manner what it would be like in a world transformed by the relative decline of the United States, the over-armament of the Soviets and the neutralizing temptation of the Europeans.

Domestically, Aron observed that the new president “has a mandate from the voters to fight against unemployment and inflation, not to install a French socialism,” inasmuch as “the traditional barriers” against socialism—religion, the family, the ideologies of the past—remained in place. “This year, socialism represented change, novelty,” but “the charm of novelty” will enjoy a “state of grace” with the voters which “will not endure.” Two of the old socialist self-contradictions will endure, however: the intention at once to nationalize industries, somehow in the service of multinationalism; and simultaneously claiming that capitalism amounts to the exploitation of man by man while attacking “the big firms which invest the bulk of their profits and only distribute a derisory percentage of their turnover to their shareholders.” It is rather the small and medium-sized businesses whose owners keep the major share of their profits for themselves, and West European socialists take care not to threaten them.

In view of the vagaries of French socialism and the disarray on the French Right, Aron calls upon his fellow moderates “to defend and illustrate liberal values” in our contemporary societies “which by their very weight, lean towards collectivist organizations.” This is of course Tocqueville’s critique of democracy—that is, social equality—which exercises a what we now call ‘peer pressure’ against the individual and political liberty prized by modern liberalism. Against this tendency, Tocqueville recommends civic associations; more than a century later, Aron adds that such organizations can, if their members are not careful, serve to reinforce statist collectivism, either finding themselves taken over by the ‘totalitarian’ state or lending themselves to collaboration with the administrative state that has organized itself within the republican regimes.

Too often, moderates have tended to go along with the collectivist reforms of socialists. “It is still necessary, when the favors of the voters return to the losers of today, that they bring to the French, beyond social advantages, a representation of the good society different from that of the socialist Party.” For, while it is true that “parties can retain power without a project,” “can they conquer it when they have none?” 

The interplay between democracy or equality and liberty is precisely the theme of the Aron lecture Pierre Manent has edited and introduced, a lecture delivered at the Collège de France in April 1978. Wary of abstractions, Aron begins by remarking, “I seldom like to use the word liberty in the singular.” He wants his listeners rather to think about liberties, the specific instances of liberty. “Even in the most despotic societies, individuals enjoy certain liberties,” and in the free societies one must choose among the many liberties one may exercise, recognizing that to exercise one liberty often entails preventing other liberties from being exercised, as (for example) my political demonstration may be your inconvenience. Or, to cite another common habit, to condemn “in an extreme manner” a governmental policy, whether a law or a war, you may interfere with the government’s ability to function at all, to “apply or sustain the law or the policy.” What is the criterion for such choices? Liberals may reply that the criterion is liberal in the abstract, the right to liberty.  But the problem with liberty as an abstraction, deduced from the modern ‘state of nature’ theory, which requires of the state that it protect our persons and property, is that the mere deduction doesn’t indicate how the state should or can go about doing that. France’s 1789 Rights of Man and the Citizen says that “Liberty consists of the power to do anything which does not harm others; thus, the exercise of the natural rights of each man is limited only to those which assure other members of society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits cannot be determined by the law.” Aron cannot share the enthusiasm of the old revolutionaries for such practically unhelpful generalizing. “This formula is at the same time in a sense evident and in another sense nearly devoid of meaning.” 

“Therefore, without pretending to make a general theory of liberties for all societies, I attempt here now to specify the content of our liberties, in our democratic countries, prosperous and liberal.” “The public power recognizes in individuals and guarantees” four liberties: individual security; liberty of movement; liberty of choice of employment or work, and liberty of choice of what we purchase; liberty of opinion, expression, and communication, including religious liberties. The paradox of individual security is that the liberties associated with it (the right of habeas corpus, the right to a jury trial, etc.) are both guaranteed by the state and against the police powers and the powers of courts. “Among us, the ambivalence is strong.” Liberty of movement means both movement within the borders of our own country and over its borders, if one becomes dissatisfied with the conditions there—a “relatively rare” liberty in human history.  In addition to these “personal liberties,” the state also guarantees three political liberties, namely, voting, protesting, assembly. And there are social liberties, particularly the liberty of association. Associations do indeed resist democratization or egalitarianism, inasmuch as “professional life is not organized along democratic principles”; it is hierarchical. 

All these liberties may be formal and/or real. In contemporary liberal societies, or personal and social liberties are real, but the reality or mere formality of our political liberties is a more complex matter. Political liberties have “symbolic value” and “indirectly a considerable efficacy in most circumstances.” For example, the right to vote bespeaks “the equality of all individuals,” although in reality a vote in a national election is only one among millions, and the choice often lies between two candidates one dislikes, or two parties one finds troubling. The right is nonetheless real in the sense that it is efficacious. Regimes that govern by majority consent do in fact preserve our liberties—better, if imperfectly, than other regimes do— as the history of the twentieth century has shown. “The heart” of citizen liberties is “liberty of participation in the state by the half-way of procedures, elections and others, which we know,” but all of these liberties, personal, social, and political “are defined at the same time from the State and against it.” 

This causes a problem. In contemporary liberal societies “many individuals have the feeling that they are not free,” experiencing the regime as oppressive, sometimes because our society has inequalities, partly because there are so many kinds of liberty that one is bound to feel deprived of some of them. Too, the real society doesn’t measure up to their own personal conception of the good society. In other words, “the consciousness of liberty is not separated from the consciousness of the legitimacy of the society,” constrained as liberty is by hierarchies in the workplace and by the social liberties of “collective” organizations themselves, whether a firm of a labor union. Such consciousness cannot be satisfied by rearranging political and social institutions alone, or simply by changing the laws. And it cannot be satisfied by the search for and even the discovery of “rights of man that are universally valid.” Satisfaction of one’s consciousness of liberty supposes rather a civilization, “in large measure a civilization like ours, which protects and even encourages the free activity of everyone.” That is, the consciousness of liberty will satisfy itself only in civil—ization, in partaking of the civic culture. “After all, in Greek antiquity, the liberty of cities was primordial. The liberty par excellence was the liberty of the group, the city.” We no longer find such rigorously political liberty sufficient to satisfy us, but it remains indispensable to the human consciousness of liberty in practice, in the lives we actually live.

By such civic participation, we will need to pose and answer certain questions of political philosophy, while perhaps taking care not to call them that in our deliberations with fellow-citizens who are not particularly philosophic. What is the ‘rank order’ of liberties? “What is the relation between political and social liberties such as I have analyzed and the philosophy of liberty?” And “what is the liberty par excellence?” To answer that last question, one would need to describe “the good society,” then rank liberty and liberties in terms of it. The past two centuries have seen such questions raised in the debates between democratic republicans, partisans of political liberty, and socialists, partisans of social liberty. This debate resulted in “a severe lesson,” seen in the socialist regimes.

Marxian socialists have long charged that liberties in the liberal republics amounted only to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat. The remedy, Marx and Lenin both claimed, would be the dictatorship of the proletariat, the ever-growing majority within the industrialized societies. The Soviet Union put this into practice, yielding not real proletarian rule but another ruling class that quickly suppressed personal liberties along with social and political ones. This experience strongly suggests that there is always a ruling class of some sort, that “the difference between societies is the mode of exercising power by the ruling minorities, and the guarantees that the State or these powers are in a position to give to the governed.” While in the past, liberalism justifies itself with “some philosophic doctrines”—those abstract ideas Aron views with caution— today liberalism justifies itself “in a negative, or defense manner” against totalitarianism, even as some earlier liberals of the Enlightenment had defined it “against the absolutism of a religion.”

Well articulated by Aron’s eminent contemporary, the British political thinker Isaiah Berlin, this definition will not do. Resistance to tyranny in all its forms remains indispensable, but liberal-democratic regimes need more than that to justify themselves. As seen most impressively in the writings of Montesquieu, “one of the great ideas of the liberal democratic movement was to progressively introduce the constitutional principle into the government of men.” The then-recent ‘Watergate’ scandal, which brought down the Nixon presidency in America, illustrated the worth of proper governmental procedures, political participation, and the rule of law. 

The danger to liberal democracy from within the liberal democracies themselves comes not from any overt appeal to modern ‘totalitarian’ tyrannies, now mostly discredited, but from a radical egalitarianism that democracy fosters in the minds and hearts of citizens. Today, “in the measure that one tends to confound, more and more, liberty and equality, any form of inequality becomes a violation of liberty.” Beneath this confusion lurks another, worse one. It might be called Nietzschean egalitarianism. “If you define liberty as power,” the claim that any form of inequality amounts to a violation of liberty is “evident.” “But if one retains the strict and rigorous sense of liberty—liberty as equal right—then equality of rights cannot be transmitted, in an inegalitarian society, by the equality of powers.” It is one thing to allow anyone to apply for admission to a university, quite another to admit all the applicants. To allow anyone to apply for admission obviates the privileges of social and economic class as they impinge upon the advancement of merit. To admit everyone to a university will interfere with the advancement of merit just as surely as the established class privileges, given the limited resources of any university. This necessarily non-universal universalism of the universities exemplifies the collision between social equality and necessarily hierarchic civil associations.

The French ‘New Philosophers’—Aron is thinking of such men as Bernard-Henri Lévy, Jean-Marie Benoist, Alain Finkelraut, and André Glucksmann, former Marxists who sobered up after reading Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago —have clearly seen this confusion of equality and power but overreact to it by rejecting “power itself.” For all the merit of their newfound anti-communism (to which they added a firm critique of Heidegger and other recent idolators of Rightist power), they fall into the sort of self-contradiction seen, nearly two decades earlier, in the Port Huron Statement, the founding screed of the American New Left. They would like to combine communalism with anarchy, but “I fear that these two ideas are antipodes to one another,” as indeed Walter Berns had noted in his critique of New-Left ideology. [3]

Aron politely dismisses such niaiseries. He reminds his listeners that “there is a great philosophic tradition according to which authentic liberty is the mastery of reason or the will over the passions.” “Liberty par excellence” guides the will, giving direction to choice, as distinguished from liberating the passions, which do not, strictly speaking, choose but merely impel. Genuine liberty doesn’t make reason the scout of the passions, as Hobbes contended in his advocacy of absolutist monarchic regimes in a powerful modern state. It is true, Aron remarks, that philosophic liberty and political liberty are not the same; philosophic liberty means the liberty of the human soul to think rationally, to live a life of the mind as the proper activity of a rightly ordered soul; political liberty, the liberty of a free citizen who is usually not a philosopher, consists of ruling oneself according to laws he and his fellow citizens have made, guided not by the theorizing reason of the philosopher but the practical reasoning that asks not so much ‘What is X?’—justice, nature, custom—but ‘What shall we do?’ Shall: “civism is a part of morality.” 

However, “in the majority of Western societies” today, “liberty situates itself in the liberation of the desires.” Under this hedonistic framework, “it is the State or power” is made “the enemy of individual desires.” Even the liberal-democratic state’s enforcement of toleration—its protection of religious practice and of freedom of speech and of the press—has been damned as “repressive” by the likes of Herbert Marcuse, in the name of “the liberation of eros.” Aron unhesitatingly calls this “the moral crisis of liberal democracies.” [4]

Contrary to these claims, “the theories of democracy and the theories of liberalism have always in some way included the definition of the virtuous citizen or the way of life that will conform to the ideal of a free society.” It is scarcely possible “to give stability to democratic regimes” without ideas of what is just, without a “conception of good and bad.” But “the fact is that today, it appears to me extremely difficult, whether in the lycées or the universities, to speak seriously about the duties of citizens.” Against the phantom of ‘repressive toleration,’ educationists begin to impose a frankly repressive intolerance. Aron generously nods at André Malraux, who had identified and deplored this trend in his memoir, Le temps des limbes. “Like him, I am not sure that in our societies,” in some measure animated by a sort of egalitarian nihilism, “there is still a representation of the good society, or a representation of the ideal or accomplished man”—the ‘man in full,’ the completed human being. “Perhaps this kind of skepticism which underlies liberalism is the necessary culmination of our civilizations,” yet there can be no doubt that Western civilization faces rival regimes which do not hesitate to uphold their own “principle of legitimacy and their representation of the good society and the virtuous man.” While “I am not sure that such indoctrination as we encounter elsewhere really succeeds,” and “I do not conclude that all societies of the rest of humanity have for their vocation to organize their common life on our model, I say that we should never forget, in the measure to which we love liberties or liberty, that we enjoy a rare privilege in history and in space.” 

 

Notes

1. In this, Aron proved mistaken. Soustelle, who had served as Secretary-General of the RPF throughout its existence and who had been appointed governor of French Algeria by a subsequent French government, surviving an assassination attempt by the FLN, aided de Gaulle in his return to power in 1958 but broke with him when de Gaulle chose to grant independence to Algeria in 1960. 
2. Casanova smartly presents us with Aron’s excellent refutation of the charge that de Gaulle had real affinities with the pre-war French Right, which in any event had always detested him and would attempt to murder him on more than one occasion. See “Maurrasism and Gaullism,” an article published in Le Figaro in December 1964. While it is true, Aron writes, that de Gaulle shares Maurras’s distaste for the regime of the parties and also Maurras’s insistence on the primacy of politics over economics, the reality of the struggle among nation-states, the permanence of national interests over ideologies, a sympathy for economic corporatism, and “the passion for France alone, at the risk of accepting that France be alone,” de Gaulle sharply departs from Maurras in his republicanism and his toleration of religious and ethnic minorities. “Gaullist France is not fixed once and for all in the Roman, monarchic, or classical order; it remains itself, but on condition that it espouses its century,” that is, adapts to existing circumstances. Unlike Maurras, de Gaulle “is conscious of the chances and necessities of our epoch,” understanding that “one commands nature only by obeying it.” Finally, again unlike Maurras, de Gaulle is no historicist. “History is not, in his eyes, a fatality to which one must submit, it si no more a benevolent divinity, it is a milieu, more or less favorable and hostile, which a statesman has the duty to understand in order to master.” Hence de Gaulle’s readiness to relinquish the French empire and to adapt France to both the existing means of production in the French, and modern economy, and to the instruments of war modern technology has invented. 
3. See Walter Berns: “The New Left and Liberal Democracy.” In How Democratic Is America? Responses to the New Left Challenge. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1971.
4. See Paul Eidelberg: “The Temptation of Herbert Marcuse.” The Review of Politics, Volume 31, Issue 4, October 1969, pp. 442-458.

 

Raymond Aron: Aron et De Gaulle. Partie I: De Gaulle et les Parties (1943-1948). Jean-Claude Casanova, ed. Paris: Calman Levy, 2022.

Raymond Aron: Liberté et Égalité: Cours au Collège de France. Pierre Manent, ed. Paris: Éditions EHESS, 2013.

 

Fifteen years younger than Charles de Gaulle, Raymond Aron came of age intellectually at about the same time that de Gaulle came of age politically, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, with a communist tyranny secured in Russia and Nazi tyranny rising across France’s border with Germany. All was not quiet on the eastern front. As republican regimes across Europe grew increasingly endangered, both men, each a staunch republican, prepared for conflict. As a Jew, Aron had what later became the obvious additional concern that neither Hitler nor Stalin much liked his people. (For his part, de Gaulle had taken the side of Captain Dreyfus as a youth, and so could claim few friends among the substantial portion of the French ‘Right’ which adhered to anti-Semitic prejudice.)

In his characteristically deep-probing introduction to “Liberty and Equality,” the concluding lecture in the last course Aron taught at the Collège de France, Pierre Manent provides an overview of Aron’s political thought, aptly remarking that “the work of Raymond Aron is like politics itself: apparently simple of access and nevertheless difficult to grasp in the last resorts and in its final ends.” One might add that Aron’s thought is political in Aristotle’s sense of politics, animated by reciprocity and deliberation, by ruling and being ruled in turn, not a matter of merely seeking influence (as do those, like Hitler and Stalin, who are all-too-sure of themselves) but seeking to be influenced—influenced not by influential persons but by the facts that turn up, by experience and by reflection upon that experience. Aron, Manent writes, spent fifty years reflecting upon politics, “an education” never completed. In politics, there is always something more to learn.

By 1978, the year of his lecture, Aron understood his lifetime, most of it lived in the political, intellectual, and spiritual aftermath of the Great War—that vast deflation of once-fashionable confidence in inevitable historical progress—as “an epoch wherein European politics had begun to put European civilization in danger.” “Germany made the destiny of Aron.” He knew Germany rather well, having spent the ominous years of 1930-1933 in Cologne and Berlin, where he studied the writings of Max Weber. Aron admired the philosophic sociologist’s “sense of the conflict, of the drama and even the tragedy that is the human adventure.” German sociology provided him with “intellectual equipment” indispensable for the coming “black years.”

Unlike most German intellectuals, but exactly like that maïtre of democratic civil society, Alexis de Tocqueville, Aron detested “deterministic evolution” and “historical relativism,” which he regarded as “two strategies opposed to one another but equally ruinous, neutralizing or abolishing the proper character of the historical condition of man and his specific tragedy, which is precisely that man is neither the lord nor the plaything of the times.” Against Hegel and his countless epigoni, “In [Aron’s] eyes, history could never become a substitute for philosophy.” He clearly saw the link between historicism as a philosophic doctrine and modern tyranny or ‘totalitarianism’ as a political ideology and practice. The existence of such a regime, instantiated by the Right and the Left, proved Weber mistaken in one sense: “the administration of things” had not replaced “the government of persons”; on the contrary, persons of tyrannical passion ruthlessly and repeatedly purged the bureaucracies they ruled, turning the remnants to acts of tyranny up to and including mass extermination of enemies real and imagined. Meanwhile, democratic-republican regimes like France’s Third Republic urgently needed to “reconstitute a directing elite, neither cynical nor cowardly, which has political courage without falling into Machiavellianism pure and simple”; additionally, and crucially, that elite needed “a minimum of faith in the common will, lest they fall into tyranny themselves, whether ‘soft’-bureaucratic, as Tocqueville had warned, or ‘hard’-dictatorial, as fascist and communist rulers exemplified.

During his long career, Aron “was, with Bertrand de Jouvenel, the principal representative of French liberalism.” And if his (how you say?) research agenda derived from Weber, his reflections upon European political experience took him in an Aristotelian direction, made him into a political sociologist ‘of an Aristotelian mark.’ For him, liberalism was not a doctrine but a form of politics that “presented the best chances for rationality” and for “a life of human dignity”—rather as the American Founders saw things. The hyper-politicism of Carl Schmitt and the nearly apolitical economism of Friedrich von Hayek amounted to dazzling and deluding extremes that obscured the political character of liberalism—Schmitt, by denying liberalism has political content at all, Hayek by wishing that were true. In Aron’s more sober view, political liberalism consisted of the rule of law (so far, Hayek concurred) but also the understanding that foreign policy cannot be governed by law, even the ‘law of nations,’ but by men, and preferably just and prudent ones; no amount of Hayek’s beloved “spontaneous organization” animated by free trade will suffice. Further, political good “are difficult to produce,” even more difficult than commercial goods because they are often intangible, matters of honor and of justice. As Manent so judiciously puts it, “Aron was a liberal classic more than a classical liberal,” that is, “not so much a modern,” entertaining no “intemperate hopes in progress or in ‘modernity,'” but instead esteeming the classical virtues of moderation, sobriety, and “qualitative merit,” succumbing neither to the madness-inclining spiritedness of modern tyranny nor to the weak and poor-spirited shrinking from political and military reality that progressivist ‘idealists’ nurture but instead exhibiting a “virile acceptance of the limits in which human life is placed.” Virility or manliness need not careen into Achillean bloody-mindedness, if one is un homme sérieux. And so Aron’s classicism remained untainted by “nostalgia for the Greek polis or the ‘ages of faith,'” both no longer humanly recoverable, but is “particularly illustrated in the manner in which Aron conducted his political and sociological inquiries,” in which he located rights not so much in abstract doctrine but “a sort of ‘rule of ends,'” which never, computer-like, ‘prints out’ the prudential choices citizens must make. That is, ‘History’ determines only some things; it gives us our set of circumstances, which we as citizens must then understand, assess, and act within, but are seldom simply compelled by. 

This made Aron the adversary not only of the regime of modern tyranny but of all those persons, however well-intentioned, who want to wipe the slate of our circumstances clean. One should not condemn “the society of which we are members in the name of a past glory or of a regime of the future.” A ‘classical’ soul living in modern circumstances, “Aron accepted the overall characteristics of the modern society and regime.” With Aristotle, he began his inquiries with consideration of the opinions of his fellow citizens—especially, their opinions on liberty and equality, not as ideas simply but as combinations of ideas and sentiments which “orient the evaluations and actions of men.” In testing those opinions against reality, in refining and enlarging the public views, Aron showed us that “the gaze of the wise man encourages the virtue of the citizen.” 

While Manent surveys Aron’s intellectual trajectory, the economist Jean-Claude Casanova’s introductory essay to Aron et De Gaulle hews to the facts of his old friend’s biography. He knew Aron very well, having co-founded the journal Commentaire with him in 1978. He recounts that Aron escaped from Nazi-occupied France in late June of 1940. Like most Frenchmen, he had not heard de Gaulle’s now-famous eighteenth-of June radio ‘Call to Honor,’ broadcast by the BBC from his London exile. But he rightly anticipated that Churchill would never treat with Hitler, made his way to England, and soon found himself the editor of La France libre, a journal dedicated to exactly that purpose. Aron was thirty years old, already the author of the 1939 article, “Democratic States and Totalitarian States,” in which he had accurately described the geopolitical lay of the European land. He shared with Churchill and de Gaulle the confidence that American entry into the war would tip the balance against the Nazis.

After the liberation, he served briefly as André Malraux’s chief of staff during Malraux’s tenure as de Gaulle’s Minister of Information. He quit the editorship of La France Libre in June 1945, now publishing frequently in the journal Combat and in Le Figaro, then as now a leading newspaper in France. It was in this postwar period that he wrote his still-remembered, entirely accurate assessment of the Cold War: “Peace impossible, war improbable,” a formula which invites us to understand that peace isn’t the mere absence of war. Observing the parliamentary maelstrom that re-emerged in France in those years, he also remarked, again rightly, that the division between the Communist Party and the center-Left parties was sharper than the division between the centrists and the Gaullists, that the latter parties were real democrats, the Communists shammers. The controversy between the Gaullists and their fellow republicans was whether the French republican regime should be centered in a unicameral legislature or balanced between the executive and legislative branches, with the executive having charge of foreign policy. In this, Aron sided with the Gaullists, but only after writing an earlier piece, published in 1943, warning against the French (and not only French) tendency toward Bonapartism. 

In the 1950s, unlike most of the French, Aron advocated Algerian independence, considering Algeria too Muslim to remain French. At this time, Gaullists were against decolonization, although de Gaulle himself, having seen the futility of French rule in Syria while posted there in the early 1930s, had likely begun to have other ideas. He also departed from the Gaullists in his friendly sentiments toward the Americans as prior liberators and current protectors of Europe against the tyrannical regimes still menacing France and the rest of Western Europe, nearby to the east. In 1958, while teaching at the Sorbonne, Aron applauded de Gaulle’s return to power as a “legislator” in the Rousseauan but also classical sense of a “founder of institutions”—namely, the constitution of the Fifth Republic. “Raymond Aron admired de Gaulle without always approving of him,” disagreeing with the General’s withdrawal from NATO, his anti-Israeli remarks in the aftermath of the 1967 war, and his call for U. S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1967. Through it all, Aron remained an “engaged spectator” of the Fifth Republic and of European politics generally. If de Gaulle had what Malraux once called “geological courage,” Aron had geological, rock-solid, good sense.

Nor did he lack civic courage. In the one wartime essay published here, “The Spirit of Bonaparte,” Aron raised a cautionary flag at de Gaulle himself in the form of a monitory history of French absolutism, an ambition for which many suspected the General of entertaining. He begins with a certain jaunty irony: “Since the traditional monarchy collapsed in the revolutionary tempest [of 1789], France has multiplied its political experiences with prodigality,” to wit, three constitutional monarchies (divided between two dynasties), two plebiscitary empires (Napoléon I and Napoléon III), and two parliamentary republics. “But the social structure of France,” French civil society, “was less shaken during this period than those of other great countries of Europe.” The political crises were caused by “conflicts and traditions and ideologies over, as one says today, the principle of legitimacy,” specifically, the aristocratic-monarchic model against the elective-democratic model. That is, what embittered French political life were controversies over the foundation of political life itself, the regime. A form of democratic republicanism finally established itself (firmly, this time) in 1871, though shaken by the Great War and finally overwhelmed by the Nazi Blitzkrieg in 1940. Now, in 1943, humiliated and “vibrat[ing] with a touchy patriotism, the French want to restore “a regime of liberty,” once the Allies throw out the Nazis. France seeks an effective government to repair the ruins and to strengthen the new armature of the country.” She wants no extremism but she does want unity, and, unfortunately, the regimes most successful in promoting unity in recent French history have been Bonapartist—plebiscitary despotisms, phenomena seen in many countries but with distinctive French characteristics.

Napoléon I having been sui generis, Aron concentrates his readers’ attention on his much more ordinary nephew, Louis-Napoléon. Louis-Napoléon regarded himself as one of those providential personages “in whose hands the destinies of their countries are placed,” and it did indeed require qualities owing less to his nature than to his fortune in order for such a mediocrity to ascend to prominence: “his name” and “the circumstances” which “transformed a mediocrity into an emperor.” He owed his popularity to “a cult founded on memory”—the “Napoleonic myth”—bestowed upon this hitherto “unknown person.” He and his political allies reinforced the myth by “purely personal propaganda, approaching commercial advertising,” which included pictures and songs. As to the circumstances, the people were terrified by the workers’ revolt of 1848 and wanted a “party of order” to quell the disturbances. The shrewd parliamentary Adolphe Thiers, who had already acted as a kingmaker in the 1830 “July Restoration” of the Bourbon line, judged Louis-Napoléon “a cretin,” and therefore “an ideal candidate” for the inaugural presidency of the Second Republic, as against the alternative, Louis-Eugène Cavaignac, a capable French general, previously Minister of War, whom Thiers regarded as too sympathetic to the Left. “For the first time, but not for the last time in the history of Europe, the most reactionary elements of the ruling classes gave their approval to an adventurer against a conservative republican,” hoping that the adventurer’s “popularity among the popular classes would be the best barrier against social troubles.” The pattern would be repeated, much more ominously, in Italy with Mussolini and in Germany with the choice of Hitler over Brüning. “Across the country, the masses, overheated by a mythology and maneuvered by the party of order, assured a brilliant victory to a phantom of a hero.” More, this election “confirmed the unpredictable results of a plebiscite organized outside the parties,” an election animated by a passing if powerful sentiment instead of “durable political convictions.” “Inevitably,” the plebiscitary system “favors the candidate who appears the most charismatic, the demagogue more than the bourgeois, the inheritor of the revolutionary general [the first Napoleon] against the conservative general.” This election by the whole people elevated Louis-Napoléon above the assembly deputies, who in any event were factionalized between advocates of a social regime and the petit-bourgeois supporters of commercial republicanism. 

So disunited were the republicans, they proved “incapable of common action, even for defending the Republic” against a president who had begun to believe his own propaganda. Imitating Napoléon I, Louis-Napoléon paraded around the country in military array; he named his own ministers, ignoring the parliamentarians—all of this “a sort of pale prefiguration of the train of gangsterism which surrounds the tyrants of today.” Captains of industry and finance, having rallied to his candidacy in 1848, successfully prepared for “the coup d’état of Napoléon III” in 1852, an event staged in the name of nothing less than republicanism. “Louis-Napoléon, like all plebiscitary chiefs, is in a sense the substitute for a monarch.” But not the traditional, dynastic monarch he invoked “revolutionary dogmas (national sovereignty, civil equality, property) combined with the defense of order and social stability.” Thus was effected “the transformation of an unknown émigré” into the “emperor of France.” 

De Gaulle’s friends in exile may be excused for suspecting that Aron implied in all of this any number of resemblances, real and potential, to de Gaulle himself, especially as Aron went on to consider the career of Georges Ernest Boulanger, another Bonapartist (though not himself a Bonaparte), whose fervent nationalism, expressed in his calls for the recovery of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, which France had lost in its war with Prussia, earned him the title “General Révanche.” Thiers was gone, but Boulanger had another parliamentary maneuverer, Georges Clemenceau, as his sponsor, early on. The American president, Franklin Roosevelt, indeed compared de Gaulle to Boulanger at this time, so the thought was in the air.

Aron identifies five conditions in which such plebiscitary dictators arise. First, in France, when “the popularity of a man is simply the popularity of a name; ‘Bonaparte’ was associated with national self-respect. To this, add “nostalgia for a certain reconciliation between the heritage of revolutionary romanticism and the stabilization of the established order.” Almost no one in France outside the Army and French ruling circles knew de Gaulle, either, but his speeches in London had brought popularity to his name. Second, the bourgeois classes may rally to the new ‘Caesar’ because they fear social troubles (the Communist Party was the most powerful party in wartime France, organizing much of the underground resistance to Nazi rule) and in light of the impossibility of a monarchic restoration (given the “dynastic disunion” between Bourbons and Orléanists). The third condition of Bonapartism or Caesarism is disdain, sometimes earned, of the parliament. Crucially, in France “the Republic and democracy” are terms that “express rather a certain sentimentality or a certain revolutionary ideology than a choice decided in favor of determined methods of deliberation and government.” The French of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries bore little resemblance to the Americans of 1776-1800. Fourth, Bonapartism thrives when republicans and the French people themselves are divided but long for unity. And finally there are the chances offered by the plebiscitary system of election itself, which (as Louis-Napoléon had shown) lends itself to an eventual coup d’état. 

Boulanger enjoyed a similar set of circumstances. As a general, then Minister of War in 1885, he’d established himself as a friend of social order. He had some parliamentary support, especially among the Radical Party of Clemenceau. He shrewdly proposed to exclude the military and military families from rule, thus appealing to the Left and turning on his old military chief, Henri d’Orléans, the Duke of Aumale—a likely parallel to de Gaulle’s break with his patron, the great (if now much-diminished) Philippe Pétain, who had lost credit with many of his countrymen by agreeing to head the puppet government headquartered in Vichy, in southern France. The reforms Boulanger had introduced into the army had enhanced his popularity (even as de Gaulle’s advocacy of tank warfare, against the French military establishment in the 1930s, had given him credit after the Maginot Line was breached in 1940). Boulanger effectively played on révanchist sentiments, as of course de Gaulle was quite rightly doing; his propaganda was similar to that of Louis-Napoléon, with its “advertisements like those of American commerce”; he had ‘evolved’ from Left to Right; and he wanted “a strong government” (by which Aron means an executive branch) to balance the parliament, as indeed de Gaulle now wanted. And, in a sentence that must have deeply offended the Gaullists, “Like Hitler never ceasing to denounce the ‘system’ of Weimar, the Boulangerists reprimanded the republican personnel and regime,” rulers who had acceded, Hitler charged, to “the scandal of Wilson”—that is, the Versailles Treaty, its terms understandably hated by Germans—and who had indulged in “factional quarrels” without vindicating the national honor. 

Unlike 1849 and 1851, however, in 1889 the parliamentarians were alert to the danger. And Boulanger was by then only a Parisian parliamentarian, not a president of the Republic, as Louis-Napoléon had been when he staged his coup. Boulanger amounted to little more than a “Caesar of the music-hall,” a point that illustrates “the fragility of these brilliant popularities.” Gaullists, take note? They would surely take offense, and did.

Aron then asks, are Bonapartism and fascism “specimens of the same genre”? Not really. The Second Empire established itself in a period of economic prosperity, not depression. The Bonapartists were supported by small peasant proprietors, defending their landed property; what Tocqueville calls democracy, social egalitarianism, was the heritage of the Revolution, which by now had replaced aristocratic and Church hierarchies, as indeed Marx observed at the time. This, indeed, is what made the political device of plebiscitary election feasible and appealing. By now, too, there were many more city-dwellers, including some petit-bourgeois many artisans, and “even workers” who thrilled to the myth of the charismatic leader, the national hero leading to mass mobilization. Several of these features did indeed resemble the circumstances in which fascism arose, and in nineteenth-century France, as in twentieth-century Italy and Germany, “Popular Caesarism” became possible due to an alliance of a part of the bourgeoisie and a part of the proletariat against dynastic monarchy and against the “menace to the social order” posed by the Left. Still, the comparative extremism of the later fascists was fostered by an economic desperation not seen in France. The French were responding to “social troubles and the weaknesses of all the constitutions” they had seen in previous decades. The fascists exploited economic as well as political crisis, and that made them more radical, more dangerous. In France, it was regime instability that caused “the desire for a strong power, incarnated in one man,” a longing for “unity of sentiment,” in the phrase of the celebrated writer, Maurice Barrès. What occurred in mid-nineteenth century France, was “the anticipation of and the French version of fascism” but never the thing itself. 

“Uncertain of his rights and his fortune, the Caesar is unceasingly pushed toward new enterprises by the insatiable need of renewing the source of his authority, of refreshing the favor if his own people.” Hence Napoléon III’s vain march against Germany, resulting in the catastrophic defeat at Sedan in 1871. “As in so many times in history, the adventure of a man ended in tragedy for a nation.” 

Three years later, Aron looked upon de Gaulle with much more confidence, having observed his decidedly republican, not Bonapartist, policies during the war and its immediate aftermath. In June 1946, the fifth anniversary of de Gaulle’s now-famous radio “appeal” to the French from London, de Gaulle had given a speech in Bayeux, advocating a new constitution in which the executive branch would have independence from the legislative branch—this, to remedy the foreign-policy imbecility repeatedly demonstrated by the parliament-centered and factionalized Third Republic. This speech, Aron wrote, “manifestly pursues a higher ambition” than the resolution of some immediate crisis; de Gaulle aims “to influence the evolution of the political crisis in which the French nation is floundering,” the “central theme” being “that of a State worthy of the name.” “The thought of General de Gaulle is manifestly dominated by one major care: How to prevent the State, torn between rival ambitions, not to disaggregate to the point that the country has only the choice between anarchy and a tyranny.” Such an ambition and such a thought obviously elevated de Gaulle well above a Louis-Philippe, to say nothing of a Boulanger.

Such a reform was urgently needed. “The politicization of l’existence Française—economics, administration, literature—has progressed in a manner recalling the last years of the Weimar Republic.” The supposedly apolitical administrative state itself has been politicized, as well, as the cabinet offices have been divided among the three major parties (republican, democratic-socialist, and communist). “Such a regime, by definition, can offer no promise of stability.” In his proposal for a president installed by a large electoral college, not just the National Assembly, de Gaulle would establish an element within the State that is above the parties, an element which “takes account of the national interests in their continuity.” This “decisive idea, which provokes the most criticisms,” would take executive power out of the hands of party leaders. The president, “foreign to partisan conflicts, would be the equitable arbiter” among them, attending to “the general interest” of the French nation—impartial “with regard to all groups and organizations, passionate only for France and her grandeur.” 

De Gaulle’s proposed constitution is undeniably republican, but is it presidential or parliamentary? The president names the ministers but do the ministers report to the Assembly (as in Britain) or to the president (as in the United States)? Aron says it does neither, that it isn’t inspired by “the Anglo-Saxon democracies” at all. In them, “the stability of the executive” is “rooted in a traditional principle, between the system of two parties and the constitutional mechanism.” In Britain, socialists and conservatives tend to agree on British national interests, especially in foreign policy; in America, the same attitude prevails among Democrats and Republicans (as it did at the end of the Second World War, very much in contrast to the end of the First World War). But in France, as noted, the parties are ‘regime’ parties; France needs the model of the arbiter-executive to a degree that the “Anglo-Saxon democracies” do not. De Gaulle intends thereby to counterbalance “the regime of the parties,” which consists of a regime that cannot actually rule because they each attract substantial voting blocs but share scarcely any conception of what France should be and do. Although de Gaulle’s critics decry his Constitution as undemocratic, true defenders of democracy, Aron insists, want a regime that functions. 

Against this proposal, the National Assembly had proposed a constitution similar to that of the Third Republic. This merely “codifies and prolongs the current practice without seriously modifying it, the practice of parliamentarism under its present form, that is, the regime of the parties.” De Gaulle’s proposed constitution instead “requires the parties to renounce one part of the power they retain” from the pre-war regime. In so doing, he has consulted “History and the experience it gives to reason,” rather than assuming that the course of history itself must be rational, as Marxists of both the democratic and the Leninist stripe do. In doing so, Aron now sees, de Gaulle’s Bayeux speech “conforms to the ‘style’ of June 18th [1940].” “I am not sure, on my account, that this ’18th of June strategy’ will suffice in the present situation,” in which all the major French parties had been oppressed by the Nazis, united against a common enemy, but it is true that a constitution with an “omnipotent Assembly” and a precedent and cabinet “without real authority” will fail. Against all suspicions of Gaullist Bonapartism, Aron now remarked that the General had in fact exhibited “a sense of the authority of the State, and of respect for legality”; he “has the demeanor of a legitimate sovereign, not of a usurper or a tyrant.” True, he advocates a Constitution with a strong executive, but both the American president and the former German Reich Chancellor did that, and “can one really think that Roosevelt and Hitler were leaders of the same species?” He has “rejected the formulas of presidential power and personal power,” affirming instead “the separation and balance of powers.” “General de Gaulle is not Marshall Pétain.”

The problem with de Gaulle’s proposal is not some alleged despotic intent but its current feasibility. Admittedly, the Bayeux Constitution is “perfectly legitimate on the plane of History,” but on the level of “political struggle” in today’s France it provokes “stirrings that are difficult to foresee that are not all favorable.” During the war, de Gaulle was in accord “with the sentiment of the people,” but now, in 1946, such unity of sentiment is no longer possible. “When General de Gaulle demands a homogeneous government, one well knows he has good reason in theory, but one can ask how a nation so profoundly divided as ours can have a unified government.” In the event, the Constitution for the Fourth Republic, ratified in October, reprised the parliamentary republicanism of the Third Republic, with the three major parties firmly in control of the executive.

Why so? In the United States, a Democratic Party president, Harry Truman can collaborate with a Republican-controlled Congress on many policy decisions. That is because the United States Constitution is “rooted in the habits and national convictions” of Americans. And so, given a perceived common threat, Soviet Communism, American foreign policy will not return to the “isolationism” of the 1930s. Similarly, under Great Britain’s unwritten constitution, a “homogeneous” parliamentary majority supports the Prime Minister. But in France, with its more tortured recent political history, which has spawned ‘regime’ parties, the parties “paralyze the public powers”; even when an executive administration or “government” has been formed, it is a coalition government in which “communists, socialists, and republicans continue their quarrel while feigning to collaborate.” The unspoken underlying dilemma is that one of the major parties, the Communists, do regard the Soviet Union not as a common enemy but as an ally. While the Gaullist presidency would “surmount this impotent union,” the parties are not unhappy with it. “If the Fourth Republic is endangered by dictatorship, it is not because General de Gaulle enjoys great popularity with his ideas on the organization of the State, it is because the coalitions, which pass for inevitable, are revealed to be impotent.” Under such conditions, a real ‘dictator’ might arise to deal with the next major crisis—whatever and whenever that might be. 

Given this danger, simultaneous with the regime of parliamentary republicanism which has left France in it, and given the rejection of de Gaulle’s constitution, what is to be done? “The current crisis amounts to givens that are simple to define but difficult to modify,” namely, the choice between government by a minority party or government by a coalition of two or more minority parties. “In the abstract, the first, thanks to its homogeneity, works better. Meanwhile, the economic and financial crisis continues to worsen. It can be met, but the political system prevents it, thanks to “the game of the regime.” 

By the end of November 1946, de Gaulle had refused to serve under the new constitution, breaking with the centrist parliamentary republicans with whom he had allied. Aron sympathized. Admittedly, “the life of parties cannot be separated from democratic realities,” and anti-democratic regime cause “the reduction of the parties to a unity, the identification of one party and one credo with the state which simultaneously, extends its faction to infinity and augments its authority with the prestige of a pretended absolute truth”—a form of tyranny Mussolini himself named ‘totalitarianism,’ a “confusion of the temporal and the spiritual.” [1] But in France, on the level of civil society, the regime consists of “the masses and their organizations” or civil associations. Under these conditions, it is “difficult to safeguard independence, the capacity of decision” that the “public powers” must maintain, pressured as they are by these organized “social groups.” That is, the political paralysis of the regime of the parties has a civil-social foundation that makes that regime possible and hard to dislodge or to reform. further, in that civil society, and therefore in that regime, there is a “totalitarian party,” the Communist Party, which uses “democratic methods” in an attempt “to found a regime in which it will rule alone it, it and its secular religion and its partisan State.” This is “the fundamental crisis” in France, owing in part to the fact that de Gaulle’s constitution was rejected and “the Fourth Republic exists.” It means that the parties’ “most redoubtable enemy is not outside but within themselves.” 

In April 1947, de Gaulle announced the formation of the Rassemblement du Peuple Français, a movement that amounted to a party against the regime of the parties, a party that aimed at the more nearly presidential, balanced-power republic enunciated in the Bayeux Manifesto. The leaders of the existing parties were quick to express their contempt, a contempt that may have been more affected than real. “Solidly entrenched in their fiefs, the parties must become well assured of their lot and disdain the words of a man who has no other arms than his past and his prestige.” But in reality, “the new regime” of the Fourth Republic “lacks confidence in itself and in the future.” The parties fear the Gaullist movement because they understand, ‘from the inside,’ their own vulnerability. “The Fourth Republic is founded on compromise between incompatible ideas, on the collaboration between parties which always try to continue their fight and govern in common.” Obviously, there can be no “moral unity” or “unity of action” between communists and non-communists without “a common enemy,” as there was during the Nazi Occupation. “The “true dilemma of France is this “coalition of contraries, vegetating in mediocrity and at every instant menaced by paralysis” or by ‘civil war and recourse to authoritarian methods” that would be necessary to end that war, at the expense of the regime of the parties. 

There might be a remedy for this dilemma within the legal framework of the Fourth Republic, Aron hopefully suggests. Potentially, there is a majority of democratic-republicans who, “on condition that they surmount the secondary and anachronistic quarrels, can give life back to parliament and restore the distinction, indispensable in democracy, of the majority and the opposition without such a regrouping” of the parties, “no such regime will be viable.” The only thing they currently agree on is the supposed danger to the Republic de Gaulle poses, but de Gaulle, Aron calmly observes, has respected the rule of law. One may not be entitled to condemn parties in a democracy, inasmuch as they are inevitable in any regime of liberty, but one can surely condemn a regime of “rival parties incapable of a sustained and coherent policy.” “In truth, there can scarcely be doubt about the justice of [de Gaulle’s] critique. The real question is another. What means can emerge?” That is, how can a democratic republican regime overcome the results of serious party factionalism? 

Aron recommends that the centrist party, the Mouvement Républicain Populaire, and the Socialist Party disavow collection with the Communist Party and rule as a majority—in effect forming a true ‘popular front,’ inasmuch as genuine democrats really do have enemies on the Left. This would solve, or at least ameliorate, the problem in terms consistent with the parliamentary republicanism of the Fourth Republic.  De Gaulle’s “attacks on the [Fourth Republic’s] Constitution risk the formation, against the danger of ‘personal power,’ of an artificial and sterile solidarity between the rival parties and to add one more quarrel to those we already have.” “For better or for worse, the Parliament reflects the country: there is hardly more unity in the one than in the other,” since “our official divisions are linked to the past” regime struggles.  France as it is today simply will not adopt de Gaulle’s constitution, although it is within the democratic “cadre” of regimes. It is “vain to invoke a fictional unity.” 

Aron also does not share de Gaulle’s conviction that “it is necessary to reconstruct Europe as a neutral zone established between the giant empires.” Nor does he think that it is possible to establish a socio-economic system between communism and capitalism—de Gaulle’s conception, drawn from Catholic social thought prior to the First World War, of labor-capital ‘association.’ In both his foreign and domestic policy proposals, “I fear that the president of the RPF fishes with optimism.” As of now, April 1947, “the evolution of our politics depends less on the French and their words than on the world and its tragic conflicts,” no matter how much de Gaulle, and not only de Gaulle, may detest that reality.

By July, Aron had become editor of Le Figaro. In its pages, he published a careful analysis of the French political situation. The Socialist prime minister had excluded Communist Party member from the government—a hopeful sign. The partisan constellation was now configured with the Communists on the left, the MRP and the Socialists in the center, and the Gaullists on the right. Under the Constitution (recently adopted in a third referendum), “the Assembly is sovereign, but it does not encroach upon the prerogatives of the government.” Nonetheless, the executive powers themselves are weak. As a result, “the Constitution functions badly, but the faults experience has revealed are not exactly those which the critic,” de Gaulle, “passionately denounced in advance.” The second chamber, the Council of the Republic, has withered because both the Communists and the Socialists prefer unicameralism; it had little legal authority, anyway, and now has little moral authority, either. Having taken all responsibility for itself, the Assembly has acted irresponsibly, failing to address the major issues confronting France—import policy and the Monnet Plan (the first fruit of postwar French economic central planning which sought to modernize the French economy by increasing productivity), foreign trade, and foreign investment under the dirigisme of Jean Monnet’s General Planning Commission. More, the Assembly members have failed even to “accomplish their traditional tasks” of ordinary legislation. Aron wants to see an orderly governing process, whereby the governmental ministers conceive and apply a program, the Assembly members “attend thoughtfully to the quality of the laws,” and the administrators perform the “essentially technical” task of carrying out those laws at the direction of the ministers, the “government.” Unfortunately, the instability of the governments, dominated by the Assembly, prevents them from performing their duties, while the Assembly members lack the “competence and interest” to perform the executive and technical tasks. This leaves technical matters to administrators, unsupervised and the political matters to the groups that pressure the Assembly. No real deliberation occurs in the legislative branch. “How can one be surprised that Parliament falls, little by little,” in prestige?

In reality, then, “France is governed by the administration.” The “great functionaries” in the bureaucracies hold “a considerable part of the real power.” The parties distribute ministerial posts, but the civil-social pressure groups (Aron calls them “syndicates”) can obstruct them when the parties appear to act “contrary to their interests.” This “transfer of power from assemblies to the administration is neither a new phenomenon nor an exclusively French phenomenon. It is the fated result of the increasingly ample capture [of power] of the State” by administrators. “Only the administration has the competence and the continuity”—given the short life of governments and of parliamentary coalitions—that is “necessary for directing and orienting the economy of the nation.” Characteristically, the moderate Aron regards this as “not a question of rebelling against an irreversible evolution” but “a matter of adapting old institutions to the new tasks, of asking oneself in what condition such a regime will be effective.” Because administrative rule alone won’t work, either. “Left to itself, administration becomes at once arbitrary and impotent,” as seen in “the sclerosis of our army” between the world wars. And when government ministers attempt to ‘politicize’ the administration, “one does not have the impression that the government knows better than [popular] opinion,” that it refines and enlarges the public views, or that it even has the force or the courage to execute its decisions in the face not so much of administrative recalcitrance as pressure-group opposition. “Government, parties, administration, syndicates tolerate one another reciprocally. Unfortunately, their complex relations achieve not action but disorder and paralysis.”

In twentieth-century “mass societies,” the “same problems appear—namely workers and leaders of enterprise organize themselves into syndicates” in an attempt to influence the vast and complicated apparatus of the modern state. How can such societies “establish the necessary collaboration between the syndicates, on the one hand, and the State on the other,” especially given the emergence of state bureaucracy or administration as effectively a fourth branch of power? And how can modern states under democratic-republican regimes, with governments representing the popular will, “maintain the sense of the national interest, if they represent particular interests of social groups and political parties”?

The “totalitarian regimes give a brutal, primitive response” to such questions. “Reserving to one party the exclusive right to political action, integrating into the State all the particular groups, in creating a monopoly of ideology and propaganda, they suppress the problems rather than solving them. It is good to denounce this barbaric simplification. Now one must find a solution The Fourth Republic has not resolved these problems. To speak truly it has not even posed them or thought about them.”

De Gaulle and his “Rassemblement” have thought about them. But if “all the French were Gaullists in 1944,” only “forty percent of the electors voted for the RPF in October 1947.” In 1944, Gaullism had become “the symbol and the guide of the nation in combat,” de Gaulle an arbiter, neither partisan nor doctrinaire. Now, the RPF is “the first party of France,” but still a party. The “three great parties” reorganized themselves “under the shadow of Gaullism” in the aftermath of the war. When de Gaulle recognized this and resigned as the head of the provisional government, this decision, “surprising as it seemed at the time, takes in retrospect a logical meaning.” The parties had regained “the reality of power.” Having no party, de Gaulle “little by little lost his authority.” “He ran afoul of growing economic difficulties, without either the taste to study them or an overall conception for mastering them. He attempted, in the name of a fictional national unity that had not survived the war, to assume an arbitrating function more or less illusory.” Yet in attempting to regain political authority at the head of his own party, he now participates in the impotence of the Parliament. 

Can he overcome that impotence? “If in the long term, this structure,” the Fourth Republic, “less constitutional than social and political, will not be modified, the regime will be paralyzed, and the country condemned to stagnation in the chaos.” What is needed is a “homogeneous majority” that can “break away from the syndicates under the control of the Communists,” who had succeeded to that extent in staging their long march through the institutions, and “bring them back to the legitimate function of defending professional interests, along with parliamentarism, the decline of which the crystallization of social groups has precipitated.” In the election, “the Rassemblement has pulverized the MRP and is ready to push socialism to the wall,” too. It has no doctrine, having downplayed the notion of worker-capital association, but it has a will to restore individual liberty and the liberty of the State from the syndicates and the parties. “Strong power of free citizens: the formula maintains a radical accent, provided that the first term does not erase the second.” 

For their part, the Communists, the only ideologically coherent party, need another Popular Front à la 1935, but they have alienated the Socialists by claiming that democratic socialists are no more than agents of American imperialism. Yes, they have an ideology, but what an ideology it is—one that depending upon denying reality. Quite apart from the falsity of the charge, “we have an obvious need of American aid.” The RPF, however, could bring the “government sustained by a homogeneous majority” that Aron has been hoping for.” 

This possibility proved just as illusory as Aron’s previous hopes for an RPF-Socialist coalition. Recognizing reality, de Gaulle reluctantly approved the formation of NATO in 1949, then rejected the proposed common market in coal a year later. By 1951, economic recovery and the nascent Pax Americana in Western Europe had reduced de Gaulle’s appeal, and the so-called Third Force, a renewed alliance of democratic socialists and the MRP, led by the skilled parliamentarian Guy Mollet, took control of the government. By the mid-1950s, De Gaulle retired to his home in the village of Colombey les Deux Églises to write his Mémoires de Guerre, seemingly removed from politics for the remainder of his life.

But then things took a turn.

 

 

Note

1. Aron’s phrase may remind Anglophone readers of Temporal and Eternal, the title of a collection of several writings by the Catholic writer, Charles Péguy. However, Temporal and Eternal was published in 1955. It is possible that Aron borrows and adapts the phrase from the original works, published before the First World War; de Gaulle was a careful and sympathetic reader of them.