Daniel J. Mahoney: De Gaulle: Statesmanship, Grandeur, and Democracy. Westport: Praeger, 1996.
Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 25, Number 2, Winter 1997. Republished with permission.
Unlike so many things in political life, commercial republicanism delivers on its promises. Splendid but exhausting, the martial aristocracies and monarchies that dominated Europe into the nineteenth century finally collapsed into the arms of the people, who confidently asserted that they could do better. Locke, Montesquieu, and the other great republicans looked forward to a world in which commerce and representative government would stanch the flow of blood and treasure caused by rulers who would find quarrel in a straw, when honor’s at the stake.
The republicans were right. Commercial republics don’t fight—amongst themselves. They have attracted the warlike attentions of those who mistake their peaceableness for weakness. As a result, two centuries are strewn with the wreckage of regimes that underestimated the productive/economic power that to some extent makes up for the unsteady military virtues of those republics.
What theorists could not fully anticipate was the dissatisfaction commercial republics would generate among their own most ambitious citizens. For some human beings all the time, and for most some of the time, peace and prosperity do not suffice. What the ancient Greeks called thumos—the spirited part of the soul, the part that gets angry, makes us courageous or rash, faithful or blindly loyal—does not rest content in a commercial republican regime. Thumos wants not only liberty but heroism, conspicuous preferment instead of conspicuous consumption, the ways of the lion and the eagle. Thumotic souls pose a profound political and spiritual problem at any time, but never more than here and now, in our ’embourgeoisified’ modern times.
No statesman understood this better than Charles de Gaulle. As a young military officer in the years between the world wars, de Gaulle saw thumos pushed to the point of madness in neighboring Germany, while deploring, at serious cost to his own career, the poor-spirited response of his countrymen, including a military elite rotted with complacency and cowardice. After the war, he opposed the shallow, bureaucratized internationalism of the new-republican, ‘Wilsonian’ United States and its Euro-sycophants. He faced down President Roosevelt, whose envisioned postwar order did not include any very independent Frenchmen. Throughout, de Gaulle proclaimed and embodied the virtues of political life and civil society—self-government—against the dehumanizing forces of technocracy and consumerism. National sovereignty conceived as patriotism, not reactive ‘nationalism,’ remained his political guide throughout; what looks like a Catholic-Christian Stoicism remained his moral compass.
Daniel J. Mahoney’s scholarship allies itself with civic virtue in a world not conspicuously receptive to it. In his previous book, The Liberal Political Science of Raymond Aron, Mahoney displayed a rare ability to take ample, rich materials and concentrate them into their essence, saying thing at once helpful to the novice and illuminating to the specialist. He has now written the best first book to read on Charles de Gaulle’s political thought. Those fascinated by his account will want to go on to Jean Lacouture’s generous biography, Stanley Hoffmann’s Decline or Renewal? France Since the 1930s, André Malraux’s Anti-Memoirs and Felled Oaks (both published in ampler versions as parts of Les Temps du Limbes), perhaps to Jean Dutourd’s novel, The Springtime of Life. Above all, they will turn to the writings of the statesman himself, who wrote six books and several volumes of speeches.
The man of character, de Gaulle teaches, is a born protector. Without abandoning his critical independence, Mahoney guards de Gaulle’s memory against a variety of cavils advanced in the spirit of smallness of soul: that he was a mystic or a Bonapartist, a crypto-fascist or a communist sympathizer, a Machiavellian, a Nietzschean, or a man of Weberian ‘charisma.’ None of the above, Mahoney firmly reminds us, but what can one expect from the denizens of an academic demi-culture who have forgotten Aristotle’s portrait of the great-souled man? Realist who know nothing of the realities, de Gaulle and Mahoney say of them, rightly.
Mahoney emphasizes de Gaulle’s indebtedness to a real culture, a cultivation afforded by the France of de Gaulle’s youth, with its fruitful if acrimonious tensions among Roman Catholicism, the Enlightenment, and post-Enlightenment ‘German’ ideology. He had integrated the classical elements of French culture into his heart and mind: In retirement, de Gaulle came upon a grandson trying to read Cicero in the Latin. After glancing at the passage, de Gaulle raised his eyes and recited the passage from memory. Looking down at the astonished boy, he intoned, “You should read Livy. He is much more grand.“ Although the exact character of de Gaulle’s religious convictions remains obscure—as it had to, given his political intention to unite the French—Mahoney shows beyond dispute that de Gaulle understood France as part of the Europe that had been Christendom, and worth defending for the sake of the virtues Christendom cultivated. As Mahoney writes, de Gaulle combined a “Catholic recognition of moral boundaries and political limits and classical commitment to a life of honor.” “His was a moralized ambition“: De Gaulle himself uses the striking formulation, “the good prince,” who aims to re-found republicanism in the modern world.
De Gaulle “wanted to keep democracy and greatness together,” Mahoney writes. No narrow democrat or egalitarian, de Gaulle saw what France lost when the Old Regime fell: moderation and the genuine courage moderation enforces. A century and a half of too much and too little ensued. This was true even in the two parliamentary republican regimes de Gaulle saw in the France of his lifetime, which favored too many play-acting talkers, too few real defenders of the country. In founding the more balanced regime of the Fifth Republic, with the strong executive the French needed, de Gaulle re-endowed French politics with stability, without sacrificing (Gaullists would say, by enhancing) genuine popular sovereignty. In aspiring to inculcate habits of civic participation in his countrymen, de Gaulle left them a legacy of resistance not only to the ‘hard’ tyrannies of fascism and communism, but to what Tocqueville had called the ‘soft despotism’ of bureaucracy and merely economic life, a legacy that might well be taken up by citizens who want to remain citizens and not subjects, in any country. At the same time, he firmly reminded the French that not everything is political, that political life, to be made worthy of participation, must subordinate itself to civilization and even to “a certain conception of man.” As Mahoney shows, that conception owes more to Charles Péguy than it does to Friedrich Nietzsche.
“L’Europe des patries”: De Gaulle opposed European integration precisely upon the grounds of civilization and of human nature—which, to be truly itself, must take responsibility, must govern itself. Dante, Goethe, and Chateaubriand were good Europeans because they were Italian, German, and French. The real Europe is Latinity filtered through the vernaculars, the languages by which the peoples govern themselves. The Gaullist voice is largely absent from “the present European conversation,” Mahoney observes; “his partisanship for the greatness of Europe and a Europe of nations does not seriously inspire our contemporaries,” who too often associate nationalism with its racialist deformations of the last two centuries. “Nonetheless, de Gaulle himself, and his vision of a Europe of nations stand as permanent reminders of the political and even spiritual qualities without which any future Europe could only call itself impoverished.”
Perhaps most significantly, de Gaulle’s life and writing show how a thumotic soul, the soul of a man or woman of character, might strengthen republicanism instead of subverting it, transcending the sterile adversarianism of modern elites, tending as they do to manipulation and tyranny, rule or ruin. Daniel Mahoney is a new kind of American scholar, one who views grandeur without malice, envy, or derision, one who can see de Gaulle.
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