Mort Rosenblum: Mission to Civilize: The French Way. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.
Originally published in the New York City Tribune, March 18, 1987.
For 2,000 years, the rooster has symbolized France. He rarely stops crowing, for, as Mort Rosenblum notes, the sun never sets on the French Empire, even today. The political and economic character of the empire no longer overawes anyone. But France is “perhaps the only cultural superpower”: “Freed of its colonies, it is the master”—a mastery “based firmly and squarely on illusion.”
Rosenblum is an American journalist. By illusion, he very nearly means culture, which to be sure is not exactly political, military, economic, or technological. Culture is not tangible, and both the American and the journalist in Rosenblum doubt the reality of the intangible. As an American, Rosenblum undoubtedly knows that American popular culture—its music, movies, even some of its television shows—predominates; however, he means high culture, not low.
To his credit, despite his apparent materialism, Rosenblum also senses that Voltaire and Rousseau, though dead, are not simply dead, not illusory. He does not see clearly why this is so. Perhaps one might suggest that Voltaire and Rousseau each expresses in an unsurpassed way certain thoughts that reflect human nature. Not the whole of human nature, to be sure. But recognizable parts of it—not illusions or at least not sheer illusions. If, as Rosenblum rightly says, “France adds up to more than the sum of its parts,” his book’s parts add up to less than a whole, because he hasn’t thought through what ‘cultural power’ or ‘cultural empire’ means. The French mission civilisatrice does indeed “project the rayonnement ,” the radiance, “of our culture,” as President Mitterand crows. But what are that rayonnement and the sun that generates it?
Rosenblum cannot quite say, although he says much, and much of that with wit and sense. (“The French use some English or concepts not readily found in their own language, such as fair play and gentleman.“) He identifies two principal components of Frenchness: realism and illusionism. “In France, power and self-interest are respectable goals,” but one must leaven this hard dough with panache: “One can assume any pose, and command any priority, if it is done with conviction and flair.” Oddly, neither Rostand nor his Cyrano rate an entry in the book, but the shadow of that famous nose falls on every page.
France’s universalist idealism—from the medieval crusades to ‘save’ Jerusalem to the modern ‘Rights of Man’—receive less emphasis here. Fitting neither the realistic nor the illusionistic frame, but borrowing from the contents of both, it may better explain the attraction of the rayonnement than either. Charles de Gaulle described French collaborators during the war with the Nazis as “realists who know nothing of the realities.” In doing so, he represented the strength of France, neither low-realist nor illusionist. At the time he said that, de Gaulle was scarcely more than a voice on the radio in London, and Hitler ruled continental Europe. But de Gaulle was right. Whether it speaks for liberation or conquest, French civilization owes its appeal to a partly arrogant but partly true insistence that it defends and advances humanity, civilization itself, and not only France. It therefore carries with it its own anti-imperialism, for once a conquered people discover their rights as men and citizens, rights inherent in the humanity they share with their conquerors, they have all the principles they need to end that imperialism—and the conqueror begins to lose the reason he had for his conquest. All that remains is the practical question of whether those ruled are ready to rule themselves.
History obsesses France, and Rosenblum rightly discusses the history of the French mission. He is wrong to devote only 150 pages of a 450-page book to that discussion, giving over the remainder to rehashes of well-known events and personages in a deadpan style reminiscent of the late American humorist Will Cuppy. Still, there are insights: “Those who defended colonialism as noble, and those who rejected it as immoral, each saw their view vindicated,” but in two world wars “to a large degree, France owed its freedom to officers trained in the colonies.” Rosenblum also sees that French universalism succeeds best against particularisms, tribalisms. It begins to sputter when confronted with any rival universalism; he mentions Islam, but he might also cite American principles and Marxist ideology. (De Gaulle shrewdly tried to undermine the last two by calling them mere disguises for national ambitions.)
Rosenblum has visited every corner of the French cultural empire, and he never fails to say something informative about each one. At times he has too much to say, as when he allocates twenty pages to a narration of the French destruction of a “Greenpeace” ship interfering with nuclear testing in the south Pacific; the story speaks well for Rosenblum’s journalistic diligence, but adds little to the argument of his book.
He well describes “the elaborate trompe-d’oeil” by which France ‘decolonized’ many of its African territories while retaining control with ‘advisors’ and ‘technicians.’ The still-colonized former colonies generally prefer this arrangement. In Gabon, Rosenblum asked one citizen, “Don’t you sometimes feel there are too many white faces around here?” “On the contrary,” the man replied, “there are not enough.”
As for French racism, it of course exists. But French universalism includes toleration, which often mitigates the worst hostility. Regrettably, other types of universalism do not invariably preach toleration. “For Islamic politicians, businessmen, warlords, and terrorists who feel hemmed in by the stern lines of East and West [that mark the Cold War], Paris is a secular Mecca. It is the capital of live and let live—or not.” France has difficulty delimiting its own toleration, and thus falls victim to the intolerance of others. The political fanatics it tolerates within its borders do not always tolerate it, and citizens pay in blood for a too-complaisant ‘realism.’
Rosenblum optimistically predicts, “It is certain that there will always be a France.” He should be more cautious. When he describes his friends Jean-Claud and Hélène, “both in advertising, world travelers,” as “the best of modern France,” one must worry about modern France. While I am sure these people make pleasant company, rayonnement needs more than globe-trotting publicity types to make it worth defending or heeding. Jean-Claude hopes his son “will have both roots and wings”; one knows not whether to tremble more for the mixed metaphor or the logical confusion that produced it. Rootedness and flight don’t go together, and if the best of modern France assume they do, Frenchness may turn all-illusory, on the way to evanescing.
The rayonnement of medieval France, the France of the Crusades, uneasily but impressively combined Roman and Christian forms of piety. The rayonnement of modern France is the Lumière, the Enlightenment—quite different from the civic virtues of Rome or the spiritual universalism of Christianity. The Enlightenment replaces patriotism and charity with toleration and public liberality empowered by the scientific conquest of nature. Its power comes from its appeal to comfortable self-preservation elevated somewhat by sentiments of generosity. It attracts, in part because it refuses to command. Its weakness comes from its neglect of politics, of the particular (this country, this regime), its inability to command. Its weakness is its strength, its strength its weakness.
The prospects for Frenchness may depend upon whether and how the best of modern France can make la Lumière only one part of the spectrum of rayonnement.
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