Tocqueville’s Ancien Régime Book III
In the third book of his Ancien Régime, Alexis de Tocqueville takes up the intellectual origins of the French Revolution. AT notes the at first sight strange phenomenon, that in absolutist France intellectuals were free to challenge the most fundamental political, social, and religious institutions and beliefs. While each "philosopher" had his own system and axes to grind, they all agreed that "it was right to replace the complex and traditional customs which guided the society of their time with simple and elementary rules borrowed from reason and natural law. Although he does not quite say so, the Enlightenment is the triumph of the Cartesian method, which is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature and science. The truest observation Aristotle ever made was that deductive reasoning was as out of place in ethical studies (morals, politics, the arts) as passionate rhetoric would be in a scientific demonstration. On this terrifying error of Descartes, all the intellectual heresies of the past three centuries depend.
Since all human institutions are corrupt, and since corruption can be traced to complexity, it follows that simplification of society will eliminate corruption. AT is right in his analysis, though it is sometimes difficult to comprehend how such naïve twaddle could have made any headway whatsoever. Some of the philosophes' boldness and success, AT attributes to the fact that intellectuals could not participate in politics. Being without influence and experience, they were free to spin theories which other people without experience were happy to accept.
No one could challenge the nonsense, because the aristocracy was no longer a real aristocracy either in the moral or the sociological sense. An aristocracy, as AT (anticipating Mosca) argues, imposes its values and world view on the classes that hope to emulate its betters, but in the Ancien Régime the aristocrats allowed the philosophes to form the character of their children, much as American businessmen allow their own children's minds to be ruined by Ivy League professors and their disciples who teach in prep schools.
To be continued
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"in the Ancien Régime the aristocrats allowed the philosophes to form the character of their children, much as American businessmen allow their own children’s minds to be ruined by Ivy League professors and their disciples who teach in prep schools."
What did the aristocratic parents say about this?
"My child is talking nonsense, but clearly I, the older less enlightened person, must be wrong."
Mr. Sanjay,
Perhaps, part of the problem in the 18th century lay with the nature of the aristocracy. I cannot speak for France; however, in Germany, the old Uradel, nobility embodying traditions, customs and habits tied to the land and to an ancestors prowess in warfare, was on the wane, not only in numbers but also in an objective correlative to the very traditions, customs and habits which had made them who they were, thus making them and their offspring susceptible to the abstract and simplified philosophies of their day.
As the Uradel waned, never however completely disappearing, the Briefadel waxed. These folks were the court aristocracy, holding their titles because of some service rendered to king or emperor, usually but not always in finance, bureaucracy, etc. Most in this group brought little in the way of familial custom, tradition or habits to the "table of nobility." Whereas the remnant of the Uradel tended to be against consolidation and centralization, the
Briefadel, the dependent spawn of kings who were catching the virus of Enlightenment absolutism, took on the nature of the court in which and through which they had their being. They and their offspring were highly susceptible to the abstract and simplified philosophies of their day.
In France, it may well have been different.
I'll be brief since I am responding by telephone but in the process of centralizing royal power and marginalizing the aristocracy, France took the lead. The last resistance, feeble, disorganized, and corrupt, was the Fronde, to which Mazarin easily put paid
Perhaps I am seeing an analogy where none truly exists, but do we not all see, at least to some extent, that the corruption of the American government is either explicitly fostered or implicitly encouraged by the size and complexity of the federal and state bureaucracies?
On the other hand, it seems that the "simple and elementary rules" to which AT refers have more to do with centralizing power than with anything else.
An aside: Your observation, Dr. Fleming, about Descartes is quite astute. His Discourse is an attempt to establish that there is only one way of considering a subject. In other words, there is only one science of all reality. This has had disastrous consequences for politics and ethics, yes, but also for metaphysics and philosophy of science in general.
Among many observations, AT's quotes of Morelly's 'Code of Nature' knocked my head back; it sounded like what an 8-year-old with a bad (yet "idealistic") teacher might say.
To respond, if I may, to Mr. Sanjay, I took AT to mean the aristocrat parents didn't have much to say, because they didn't have any personal experience (hands on experience) in politics or administration.
Also, or however, a question for Dr. Fleming: AT at one point argues that, seeming partly contrary to your second sentence, the church did have some sort of restraining power or authority on the French intellectuals; and that, unlike in England where principles of freedom of expression allowed it to sort itself out as it were, in France the Church's albeit minimal power just ended up vexing the intellectual class --turning the church into a target of special bile. "...[T]he Church, being specially responsible for supervising trends of thought and submitting written work for censorship [to whom? -cmc], irritated them every day." Can you explain? Was the freedom simply the result that the Church didn't really have much power and the Régime wouldn't enforce any restrictions, or something else?
Why were the French intellectuals not allowed to take part in politics? But presuming that was the case, it's relevant that the English philosophers, on the contrary, typically were personally involved in practical politics. It's a factor which partly explains, perhaps, the great difference between the English Enlightenment and the French Enlightenment. Another factor may have been the absence of Protestants in France ever since the expulsion of the Huguenots etc. I have not read Toqueville's Ancien Regime. Maybe I should.
AT's argument is that while the Church had lost the power of forming the minds of the French elite, it did have a little ability to censor books and restrict some activities. This infuriated Voltaire, who reacted to the Lisbon Earthquake by exulting over the death of so many priests and nuns--That will teach them, he said, to persecute men of genius! The fact that Voltaire, Holbach, Diderot, and Helvetius were able to publish their nonsense tells us how feeble the Church's censorship must have been.
The role of the political intellectual in 18th century France is not easy to understand without a broad knowledge of French political and cultural life. I will put a few facts on the table to help. First, in the 17th and 18th century, the French not only dominated European literature but had no serious competitors. Some people outside England admired Shakespeare, it is true, but the French and nearly everyone else preferred Racine and Corneille, and, beside Shakespeare, most major English writers were enamored of French literature. Moliere, Boileau, La Fontaine, La Bruyére--along with Racine and Corneille--were adored throughout Europe. Read in translation, they (except for Moliere) fail to impress English-speakers, but they were masters of verse and of prose. Unfortunately, this meant that when far inferior minds and characters mastered the French language--Voltaire and Rousseau,, to name two--they too were adored. A second fact is that French political life, from Louis XIII on down, was dominated by the court. There were no parties, only court factions and favorites. (I am of course exaggerating a bit). There was no Locke because there was no Shaftsbury. The best that one aspire to was to be a tutor to one of the princes, as Fenelon had been. As for the English Enlightenment, it had the great advantage of being second-rate, provincial, and behind the times. In Britain, the really smart moralists and political intellectuals were the Scots--Hutcheson, Hume, Kames, Smith. Voltaire, who had an entirely second-rate mind that harnessed a first-rate literary talent, admired Locke, but second-raters often admire their equals.
Unfortunately, as Americans we tend to view the period from 1500-1800 from the English point of view and we overrate, as a result, the English contribution to European culture and fail to grasp the greater significance of France. For reasons I do not understand even today, I liked French literature in my youth and had enough hours in college for a major. While I am far from being a learned student of French literature, I count myself very lucky to have accidentally (it seems) fallen in with the French. This week I am reading Balzac's wonderful first signed novel, Les Chouans, and the poetry of André Chénier, whom I have not read since a college survey course. In English, I am reading the Guizots' popular history of France for children--some children is all I can say--and they spend about 100 pp. on the literature of Louis XIV's reign. To think of a period that included all the writers I have already mentioned, but also Bossuet and Pascal--two of the most brilliant religious writers of the past 500 years and absolute literary masters--staggers a mind that is used to thinking of 17th century England as a high point.
Reading history and relative writings by philosophers has taught
some to beware of those called a genius. Correct me if wrong, but
Voltaire also wrote in his time there would be no Bibles in a
hundred years.
This is hilarious. "Bob" who feels free to comment on a book he admits he has never read wants to challenge a scholar on his own website. You see, "Bob," this is a monarchy and I pretty much get to say what I want. I know it is tough in a democracy to accept the notion that someone can speak with authority, but that is the way it happens to be. Some of my views on English philosophers have been expressed in one or another book or article. (Operators are standing by to take your credit card number.) In the case of Locke, he cobbled together several false ideas he had borrowed--the tabula rasa psychology, the social contract--into a usable ideology for the Whig opposition. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing depends on your evaluation of the Stuarts and their opponents, but when one has the whole range of political philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to David Hume, it is a bit much to think of Locke as a major philosopher or Voltaire as any kind of philosopher. Indeed, the Renaissance and Enlightenment specialized in the production of glib orators, not systematic thinkers, though there are exceptions like Descartes who is all too systematic. The philosophes, English as well as French, were spokesmen for a movement, and if you like the results--the French and Russian Revolutions, the collapse of moral and aesthetic standards--then you should definitely study them. Few people do because it is not necessary. Why read books telling you what nearly every grammar school teacher has taught for over a century?
Guizot was too smart to prefer the masonic, anti-clerical Louis-Philippe to the legitimist Charles X. American disdain for the French intellectual tradition perhaps is rooted in anti-Catholicism and the Anglo-Saxon bias towards consensus moderation. My favorite "glib orator" is counter-enlightenment thinker Joseph 'd Maistre, who makes Edmund Burke sound like a Anglo-Irish moderate on the French Revolution. The only French political thinker Americans are taught to know is the poisonous, non-sensical Rousseau and his fairy tale of the original social contract.
The spirit of "Les Chouans" lives in the SSPX priests from Brittany, who have helped to humble me to realize what an intellectual and cultural philistine I really am.
We should not sell the Anglo-Saxons short. There's something to be said for people who muddle through without strong first principles and, to use Augustus' personal motto, make haste slowly. Moderation is something, but the English and Americans tend to make it everything, which makes it far too easy to sell out.
Not all annoyed and I welcome your participation. I just found your remarks paradoxical and a bit amusing. What I sometimes forget is that people enter this area without having any idea of what we are about, but what I ask from newcomers is to be a bit patient. I don't have the time to go over the basic ground every time we start a new discussion. I do think you are a bit mistaken, as was AT, in your assessment of the practical political involvement of English philosophers. Bacon, if you regard him as a philosopher, yes, and Hobbes dabbled in politics but I am finding it hard to come up with serious original philosophers who found time to be active in Parliament, for example. So, no hard feelings whatsoever and please continue with your questions, which I do not promise always to answer.
Dr. Fleming - I think you should remove Bob's comments as he has politely requested. Bob - I also believe that you should stick with us for awhile and continue to ask questions as Dr. Fleming has politely asked you to do. Take it from a long-time, but cautious, participant who (usually) knows his limitations, you can learn a lot here. I also recommend that you follow the link to the Rockford Institute site at the top of the page and do a little exploring there.
For technical reasons I can now only edit or remove comments in the office. For reasons of work and a hierarchy of duties I try to postpone such tasks until I have done some real work. Finally, I should advise Bob to look before he leaps and to think before he speaks or writes. He began by telling a writer how to write and concludes with a repeated demand to be removed. All in due time.
Bob, your email address isn't in the comment area (as a reader, I can't see it) and you didn't give your last name.
I forgot to mention this, but I realize a certain influence has come over me, that gives me a mild tilt towards a certain direction.
You see, both Chronicles articles and the regular nudging and reminders to check up Tocqueville and catch up ahead in my reading of the Ancien Regime online have kept me covering on one conclusion.
That too much of the political thought and philosophy of the past 300-400 years was wrong and meant to be rejected. I am not sure if that was necessarilly the intended conclusion I was supposed to reach, but that's where I am going.
It was Tocqueville who first highlighted to me that "equality" was a tactical tool of dividing people and gaining power. That novel insight, I don't think I have seen many others reach. This insight and many others have led me to these resolutions: Unless for entertainment, shut one's mind to all politics, all global affairs, all electoral garbage, all talk of reform, and all talk of "taking our country back" or "removing evil and corruption from our institutions once and for all".
All that was nonsense, because we are inherently imperfect and evil creatures that occasionally cave into our better natures. How can you remove corrupt institutions, without changing human nature?
In at least a couple of places AT alluded to it, and in chapter four openly stated that revolutions don't happen at the end of a long, continuous suppression, but break-out when, counter-intuitively perhaps, things are getting better. "Going from bad to worse does not always mean a slide into revolution. More often than not ... a nation... rejects [burdensome laws] with violence the moment their burden lightens." For what it's worth I found that striking because I recently read something similar in the context of a discussion of a suicide, and also because I've read that it's not unheard of for people just starting to make progress in dealing with their psychological problems, i.e. starting to address and pull out of their problems, when the biggest eruptions or breakdowns occur. It's as if the person is overwhelmed by the thoughts of how much of their life has been wasted, squandered, or whatever.
What I'm wondering about is this: If I recall my schooling correctly, the lesson was that the corrupt rulers of France took her deeper and deeper into debt; that supporting the American revolution was a sort of last straw; and that eventually the king called the Estates-General of 1789 so he could fix the tax system so as to pay-off debts, which assembly took on a life of it's own. Now I learn from AT that there was great growth in the French economy in the 30-40 years before the revolution and that "the American war did not slow down" the upward trend. I can see how parts of those two views wouldn't be mutually exclusive. There could be economic growth despite large problems in the tax system and a lingering big debt.
Does my psychological analogy hold any water? Did France sort of go mad just when it was starting to face some long-buried problems and indeed _because_ it was just starting to face them? Why did Louis XVI call the Estates-General? Didn't he see any dangers? Didn't he have a plan if things got out of control? If all he wanted was a revamped tax code (no small thing for sure), wasn't there some other way of going about it? Pardon me if this is outside the scope of this discussion.
Thank you, Dr. Fleming. Now I hope Bob takes your advice to be patient, read, and ask questions.
I just love the sexism (an anachronism, I know) in AT's question "How did it happen that ... the imaginations of women and peasants were fired by notions of new systems?" (p. 171.) Imagine, a time when a man could openly make light of the spectacle of women thinking!
According to # 19, AT made light of the thinking of women - and peasants - the latter constituting at least 50% of men. The irony of history is that the notions of new systems were concocted by male intellectuals and their allies - the decadent aristocracy - and then imposed on women and peasants. It takes a man, an intellectual male, to dream up far-out theories that decimate entire cultures and civilizations. The only spectacle is not women thinking but the carnage male thinking can lead to. Nothing to be made light of, I think.
#7. Dr Fleming, I would like to ask you a question. Weren't the French intellectuals anglophiles at heart? I know Voltaire was. Wasn't he inducted into Masonry by Benjamin Franklin?
Dr. Fleming,
Your remarks about French literature reminded me that I've been meaning to ask for your opinion of Proust. I enjoyed Moliere and some of the shorter works of Balzac and Flaubert in translation, but I don't want to tackle something so huge as La Recherche without a trustworthy recommendation. Although I'm interested in the era, I confess another reason I want to read the book is what could be called the mountain climber's motive: because it's there. Another good reason in these straitened times is that, if I buy this book, I'll probably never have to buy another.
I may be the wrong person to ask about Proust. In my late teens and 20's my fondness for Proust alarmed my parents. He was of course Powell's model. As a youth I refused to believe he was, as I heard a lecturer describe him, ambidextrous. (I almost raised my hand to say my father was ambidextrous because the nuns tied his left hand behind his back.). I read him in Scott Moncrief's translation and later read most in French. I have not so much as read a page in 40 years though I plan to have a go when my French is back up to speed.
Thank you, Dr. Fleming. Hilarious about your father! I was a natural lefty, too, until they forced me to change. Ruined me, no doubt, and another reason to hate public school teachers. I'll take your comment as an unequivocal maybe; or, as they say in weather predictions for Everest ascenders, "conditions favorable but blinding squalls may arise in the afternoon."
Oh, no. My answer is an enthusiastic and unequivocal yes. It is only that I do not necessarily trust my judgment. Proust is a strange bird. A half-Jew who alternately sides with the old guard (a friend of the Daudet children who collaborated with Maurras) and with his mother's family (a Dreyfusard, for example). a homosexual who, when reproached by Gide for representing homosexual relations as sick and heterosexual relationships as real love, he answered, basically, that he could only write from experience; a complete dilletante who was known for never hitting a lick, and yet he produced the most ambitious work of fiction ever written, devoting himself to his work to the point that he refused to eat, because he thought food clouded his mind. The illness that led to his death at 52 (or was it 51?) cannot have been helped by his malnutrition. He was an aesthete and an introvert, but he was a first-rate observer of society.
That sounds unusual. Proust's eating habits, that is.
He felt food clouded his mind, but he never considered that his mind was clouding his body.
It's a particular sort of person who first becomes sedentary in order to work, and then focuses only on tasks needed from waist upwards. Then, to keep still and pay attention, he graduates from working waist upwards to using only his head. And to keep his creativity really stimulated, he only ends up using the left (or right?) side of his brain. Eventually, his other brain and the rest of his body are only support systems and means of transportation for his thinking brain.
That's less than half a person.
Some intellectuals talk about how industrialisation destroyed minds and souls of people, but literary life from much before that seemed to have already destroyed some people's bodies and physical life, and left only half the brain for regular use. Like Stephen Hawking, except without an ailment.
Many French intellectuals professed an admiration for England, though they do not seem to have understood the English terribly well. Franklin did indeed cajole Voltaire into Freemasonry, though Vhad been sympathetic to the movement for some time: He was not by nature a joiner, more a cat than a dog. Despite the general view that women are less violent than men, the truth is a bit more complex. Women are not wired to engage in violence or warfare, but if they can be stirred up to view the enemy as a threat to hearth and home, they are merciless. While they might resist entrance into a war, once they are in it they fight tooth and nail--or at least support total war.
I wouldn't be too quick to make judgments on people one doesn't know and hasn't read. Proust had been quite a social butterfly in his youth. He was seriously asthmatic, and while asthma is often partly psychosomatic, the symptoms are quite serious and alarming. He was what he was, which, I suppose, is that best that can be said of most of us. At 40 he certainly would have been voted the writer least likely to succeed--indeed, to do anything worth doing--in Paris. By the time of his death, his great work only half published, he was viewed as perhaps the greatest writer in the French language.
@20 L D'Alessio,
So you don't count S.B. Anthony, Victoria Woodhull(?), Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, De Beauvoir, et al, as thinkers? And the foul fruit of their thinking: female suffrage, birth control, abortion, no fault divorce, women in the workforce, children's "rights", coddling of "misunderstood" and "disadvantaged" criminals, promiscuity, acceptance of sodomy, abolishment of traditional sex roles and blending of sexual identities. This is all good?