FRANCE SINCE THE REVOLUTION

For the past 162 years, France has been trying to digest the French Revolution which other nations have assimilated with less difficulty. If the decay of pre-Revolutionary France had been as deep as most 19th Century historians said it was, France's problem would not have arisen. The truth was that the Revolution was made against one of the most successful social structures the world ever saw, still near the height of its vigor at the moment it was attacked. Only the most powerful revolutionary drive could have breached that structure, only the massive vigor of the pre-Revolutionary French tradition could have survived that revolutionary thrust.

Not even the Terror could sweep the men, ideas and institutions of the French past into a forgotten dust heap. The French Revolution, unlike the American and Russian Revolutions, was not left to work out its destiny in remote solitude. France's pre-Revolutionary success had made it the center of the world. What happened at the center concerned all. Within the souls of Frenchmen, and outside the borders of their country, the counter-revolutionary pressures mounted. The tumult of the irresistible crunching against the immovable made constructive thought impossible.

Most revolutions reach a period of calm: power has been grasped, principles (or slogans) accepted. What remains is the quiet and critical work of constructing the political institutions through which the power can be exercised in accordance with the new principles. The French Revolution never reached an adequate period of calm. It was preoccupied with immediate action when it needed time for consolidation. The literature of the American Revolution is constitutional philosophy (e.g., The Federalist); the literature of the French Revolution is the oratory of action (e.g., Danton's "toujours de l'audace").

The Great Weakness. Thus in the formative years of modern France a pattern was set that persisted into the relatively calm decades; even when they had time, Frenchmen did not concentrate on political institutions. They could, and did, think seriously on the lofty level of eternal verities in the relation of man and society, tapping the springs of pre-Revolutionary French thought, both conservative and radical. Or they could, and usually did, conduct their politics in terms of the expediency of the moment, carelessly altering and confusing their political institutions to conform to fitful winds. Modern France always takes itself seriously. It sometimes takes its leaders seriously. It never takes its constitutions seriously.

This accounts for the fact that the French who--with much justice--consider themselves the wisest and most mature exemplars of Western civilization, nevertheless appear in their political aspect as frivolous and immature. This was the great weakness of France during the Revolution, through the 19th Century, and is its great weakness today.

The rule of Napoleon was the nearest the French Revolution came to a period of consolidation. He adopted all three slogans of the Revolution: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. He found a political institution to fit only one: Fraternity. The institution that expressed this principle was the French nation, a new idea under the sun and one that endured through all subsequent hardships and was emulated in great or less degree by all other nations. Napoleon's mass conscript armies were raised under the novel notion of "the nation in arms" and fought under the principle of the sovereign state. In time of urgent danger to the state--and only at such times--Frenchmen have been able to unite around the institution of nationalism.

Liberty and Equality fared less well. The Code Napoleon attempted to institutionalize both. To this day, however, the Frenchman has no confidence in equality before the law. In the Anglo-American tradition, Liberty means freedom of the individual from governmental coercion, within an order of society that depends upon the individual's liberty as its main motive force. To the Frenchman (both Left and Right) who has not seriously worked on the institutions of freedom-within-order, Liberty still has the politically adolescent meaning of rebellion. Georges Bernanos put it well: "Liberty vaguely suggests the idea of disorder, a brawling mob, a scuffle with the police, the cost of food going up hour by hour at the grocer's and the butcher's . . ."

Frenchmen by the thousands have died fighting for more Liberty, or against too much of it. What the French have not learned to do is to live with Liberty--in security.

The Great Failure. Socially and economically, the French Revolution was a middle-class revolution. Napoleon and his successors (except Louis XVIII, Charles X and Leon Blum) recognized that. Here, too, the Revolution was frustrated by the strength of the old order. The French bourgeoisie became the dominant class, but never believed it. The haut bourgeois likes to think of himself as an aristocrat. The American middle class exuberantly recognized its own dominance and established its own values as the national values. The British middle class absorbed the aristocracy, including the royal family. But when a Bourbon, Louis Philippe, attempted to be a middle-class monarch in France, he was only ridiculous, and no one laughed harder at his umbrella and surgeon's kit than the French bourgeoisie.

In general, the French businessman down to the present has failed to follow the natural line of development of his class. He is committed to primitive practices of monopoly, high profits, speculation, low wages and--if he gets his wish--early retirement from business to more "aristocratic" pursuits. It would not be fair to the feudal system to say that the French businessman behaves like a rapacious feudal chief. He behaves like a bourgeois propaganda picture of a feudal chief.

Nowhere was the unresolved, undigested struggle between the old order and the Revolution more obvious, or more damaging, than in the relations between Church and State. The Revolution at first sought only separation of Church and State, but the Church was too strongly interwoven with French society to be painlessly extracted. So the Revolution sought to destroy faith, and the Church sought to destroy the Revolution. In the first half of the Third Republic's life (1871-1914), the Church-State issue was the main focus of internal French politics. The issue survives today in a fact of the utmost importance to the struggle with Communism. Although France has never ceased to be a Roman Catholic country in spirit, most of the French industrial proletariat and part of the peasantry have been cut off from Christianity for generations. Natives of the Paris industrial suburb of St. Denis are not converted to Marxism, they are baptized in the triune name of Marx, Lenin and Stalin.

That millions of French workers are born Marxists does not mean that Marx is a legitimate heir of the French Revolution. He is an interloper who picked up the allegiance of millions of Frenchmen while the leaders of France were locked in the long, unended struggle between the Revolution and the old order.

The Great Strength. Yet through the 162 years of struggle, the vitality of France, of both Frances, remained. Through the ridiculous republics and the comic restorations, through the financial swindles and the sordid half-hearted colonial adventures, the France of peasant, artisan, artist--the France of the civilized common man--has remained. This France has survived invasion, defeat, and costly victory. It has even survived French politics.

Communism, however, is a greater danger, within and without, than France has yet surmounted. The country will not win this fight unless it digests its Revolution and unifies the two Frances on more than an emergency basis.

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