Fake Tocqueville Quotes Never Die

Here is one of the more persistent ones. As a translator of Tocqueville, I frequently receive queries about this or that remark that Tocqueville is alleged to have made. By now I can recognize the common forgeries, which are frequently found posted on conservative Web sites, because they enlist Tocqueville's authority on the conservative side in some contemporary policy controversy. Tocqueville, don't you know, opposed Obamacare, tax increases on the wealthy, regulation of financial markets, what have you. Except he didn't. The forgeries usually contrive to dress up the reactionary wisdom of the moment in some sonorous verbiage intended to make the reader think that some supposedly imminent danger to the Republic was long ago foreseen by the French sage.

It's more difficult when I'm asked about a passage that I don't immediately recognize as one of the standard forgeries. Although I've translated a lot of Tocqueville, more than 3,000 pages altogether, I haven't translated let alone read or memorized all twenty-some volumes of his collected works. And it's hard to prove a negative. Tocqueville held many views on many subjects and sometimes contradicted himself, so it's perfectly possible that he said some things that may appeal to this or that contemporary political observer even if they aren't consistent with the main thrust of his thought, because he wasn't always consistent with himself. But be forewarned: if you see a Tocqueville quote which does not come with a specific reference to chapter and verse, don't count on its reliability.

New On-Line Journal

A new on-line journal entitled Contreligne has been launched. I am informed by the editor that it situates itself on the center left of the political spectrum and aims to be a generalist review of culture and politics along the lines of Commentaire and Esprit.

"Où sont les intellectuels?" Bouvet vs. Fassin

After the victory of Mitterrand in 1981, as problems started to accumulate for the new socialist government, Le Monde published an article entitled "Où sont les intellectuels?" The import of this piece was that intellectuals of the left, who had been vociferous in their critiques of government when the right was in power, had fallen silent when the left arrived, as if it had nothing to say about governing.

What about now? Where are the intellectuals? Are they silent, or have they simply become "organic," to use Gramsci's term, parts of the apparatus of government itself, specialized in technical activities such as fiscal and monetary policy, environmental regulation, labor law, etc., and therefore not suitable for discussion in public forums? Marianne, for its part, believes that there is a vital intellectual debate raging on the left but that it hasn't attained the visibility it deserves, so it arranged a face-off between Laurent Bouvet, representing what it calls "une gauche d'inspriation conservatrice, parfois souverainiste, affichant un ton nouveau sur les questions de sécurité et d'immigration," and Éric Fassin, representing a left more open to the inclusion of minority communities but no longer calling itself "multiculturalist." And this Marianne sees fit to call "the war of the lefts."

Neither side in this war has many divisions, but the generals are intent on enlisting imaginary armies. For Bouvet, his troops consist of nothing less than les classes populaires, while Fassin counters that "visible minorities" such as female workers, shop clerks, and homosexuals are not all "bourgeois bohemians" and are in fact the heart of Bouvet's imaginary army. Has "la gauche populaire," the name sometimes applied to the vague school of thought associated with Bouvet and geographer Christophe Guilluy, really emulated la droite populaire of Thierry Mariani et cie. and the Dutch "new realists," as Fassin alleges? Or have the "neo-Tocquevilleans" and "anti-racists" of old morphed into the think tank Terra Nova, which according to Bouvet would transform the Socialist Party into a third-way mishmash designed to ensconce a well-to-do socially liberal elite in power at the head of a rainbow coalition of voiceless but symbolically visible minorities?

I'm afraid I fall into the squishy marais between these two would-be montagnes. There's too much rhetorical heightening of differences for my taste and too little in the way of strategic or policy implications. La gauche populaire is right to stress the importance of solidarity, while its opponents are right to insist that protection of minority rights is essential, and that differences can be discussed without being enshrined. Et après? Les chiens aboient, les caravanes passent. But others may find more to chew on in this debate, so I bring it your attention just in case.

Rosanvallon-Hollande

I just came upon this interesting dialogue between Pierre Rosanvallon and François Hollande, which took place last year, at the beginning of the primary campaign season. In it, Rosanvallon chides "the Left" for its abstractness:

P.R. Si vous prenez des livres sur la société française qui ont rencontré le succès – Le Quai de Ouistreham de Florence Aubenas ou Les Tribulations d'une caissière d'Anna Sam –, vous voyez la différence. Ces livres sur la précarité résonnent avec le vécu de la société. Si on se contente de dire « il faut lutter contre la précarité et l'exploitation », « développer plus de solidarité », on dit des phrases justes, mais abstraites, à la surface des choses, coupées de l'expérience quotidienne. Il est à mes yeux urgent d'inventer en politique une conceptualisation « sensible » sur laquelle fonder un nouveau langage. D'autant qu'il y a de la concurrence : la phraséologie populiste qui repose sur une conceptualisation simplificatrice et une vision magique de la volonté politique. Elle ne donne consistance au « peuple » qu'en l'opposant par en haut aux élites et par en bas aux immigrés… Le défi pour la gauche dans cette campagne, c'est de trouver un langage où chacun sente que son histoire est prise en charge.

F. H. : Je m'amuse de l'inversion des rôles. Vous êtes le philosophe, je suis le politique, et vous me mettez, à juste titre, en garde contre la conceptualisation et le risque d'une trop grande abstraction des discours politiques. Le danger, en effet, est grand d'oublier de nommer les choses et les gens. Le langage politique cherche, et c'est son honneur, des solutions. Mais il fait comme si les problèmes étaient déconnectés des individus, comme si tout était global et rien n'était personnel, voire charnel, ce qui fait que l'écoute est perdue. La première condition de la crédibilité politique est de partir des situations vécues, de les reconnaître avant même de chercher une issue pour les régler. Il ne s'agit pas de se mettre à la place de chaque individu – la caissière ou l'ouvrier –, mais de parler en leur nom, d'arriver à une proposition politique donnant une perspective à toutes ces expériences singulières.

Noiriel Analyzes the FN Vote

Historian Gérard Noiriel analyzes the FN vote. Key point:

A partir des années 1980, la bureaucratisation de la société et la crise de la grande industrie ont liquidé les mouvements de masse entraînant une perte d’autonomie du politique au profit des médias. La « démocratie de partis » a laissé la place à la « démocratie d’opinion ». Le retour de l’extrême droite sur le devant de la scène est à mes yeux une conséquence directe de ces mutations. Le triomphe de la politique-spectacle a créé en effet des opportunités dont s’est saisi Jean-Marie Le Pen, en développant la stratégie des « petites phrases » conçues comme des « bombes médiatiques » qui prennent leur place dans l’actualité au côté des crimes, des catastrophes, des procès etc.

Les journalistes, pris dans les rouages de cette machine médiatique, sont contraints d’accorder de l’importance à ces poseurs de « bombes », contribuant ainsi à l’héroïsation des leaders d’extrême droite. Puisque ces derniers sont devenus des personnages centraux du récit médiatico-politique, les électeurs se sentent autorisés à voter pour le Front National. La réputation sulfureuse de ce parti séduit tout particulièrement ceux qui n’ont plus rien à perdre et qui cherchent à exprimer de la façon la plus radicale possible leur refus d’une société qui ne leur fait pas de place.

This argument strikes me as superficially appealing but empirically unfounded. Is it really true that that the FN "particularly attracts those who have nothing more to lose?" There is a good deal of evidence suggesting that the answer is no. The FN has found support in many segments of society, including retirees and small businessmen who definitely have something to lose. Its working-class support has been increasing, and some of that may come from the unemployed, but some of it also comes from the employed, who have their jobs to lose and fear losing them to immigrants willing to work for lower wages.

What Noiriel wants to call attention to, I think, is the fact that most of the public discussion of FN voters is conducted by "the political-media complex," a fancy term for people like himself and me, who speak of FN supporters as the Other and have no direct contact with the milieux in which a vote for the FN is a live option. We impute attitudes and emotions we do not really fathom: hence the "suffering" narrative, which Noiriel rejects as confabulation. That may be true, but in what respect is "the nothing more to lose" narrative an improvement? Isn't it just another name for the same thing?

Where I think Noiriel is right is in his perception of the way in which Lepenist barbs and provocations, echoed by the media, are used to construct an anti-systemic image. For voters whose judgment is that "the system" has failed them, the response is to seek the candidate whose provocations seem most disruptive of what they see as the routinized and ritualized exchanges that constitute the mainstream discourse. In the ensuing surenchère of acerbic attitude, anti-system candidates compete with each other in a closed rhetorical universe that hives itself off as a separate realm of what Noiriel calls the "democracy of opinion," in which one opinion is deemed as good as another simply because it is voiced and without need for the kind of justification once provided by ideology in the "democracy of parties." Hence the intense media interest in the Le Pen-Mélenchon face-off in Hénin-Beaumont. Nothing of consequence will be decided here, but the battle of provocateurs will surely défrayer la chronique.

"La gauche populaire"

Marianne2 has published the manifesto of a group that calls itself La Gauche Populaire. A more extensive statement can be found in a work entitled Plaidoyer pour une gauche populaire, signed by Philippe
Guibert, Laurent Bouvet, and Alain Mergier. Bouvet is also the author of a study entitled Le Sens du peuple, which presents an historical overview of the evolution of the left and of the recent cleavage, as Bouvet sees it, between the left-wing political elite and les classes populaires.

What does la GP (those of a certain age will have to be careful to distinguish between this group and la Gauche Prolétarienne of old) want? To understand this, one has to look at the fundamental premise of the manifesto: "L’élément structurant de cette élection était et reste l’inquiétude très forte des classes populaires sur la situation économique et la mondialisation." The authors argue, correctly, that the "Establishment" center-left has had a hard time responding to this "deep anxiety." What do they propose to do about this? Their response, like that of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is long on symptoms and short on remedies:

La financiarisation et la planétarisation de l’économie ont depuis quarante ans liquidé les structures unitaires de la société française. La guerre de tous contre tous entretenue par le chômage de masse, la liquidation des grands récits et de l’encadrement des masses par des idéologies structurées, l’annihilation de l’ascenseur social, la déconstruction de l’histoire nationale au bénéfice de mémoires communautarisées, la réduction de la souveraineté populaire à l’opinion publique, puis de celle-ci à des segments communautaires : ce qui faisait République a été tellement mis en cause que nombre de nos concitoyens en sont venus à estimer que l’extrême droite pouvait en représenter la sauvegarde.

They then hark back to Jaurès in search of a politics adequate to this diagnosis, and what they prescribe is "more 'social' and less 'societal.'" This detour into the jargon of sociology may be clearer in French than it is in English, but I doubt it. Here is the authors' elaboration of the point:

Une ligne politique claire s’est imposée à nous : le commun plutôt que les identités, le social avant le sociétal, l’émancipation collective plus que l’extension infinie des droits individuels, seule cette ligne politique permettant de bâtir une majorité sociologique et électorale.

Is this actually a political program or the incantatory invocation of a state of society that no longer exists, when "working class" and "bourgeoisie" were indeed collective social and cultural identities? In any case, the theorists of la Gauche pop' are convinced that the "identity" issues raised by the right are not simply masks for underlying economic issues but constitutive of a social reality of which the economy is just one aspect:

Il importe de saisir que si cette insécurité culturelle est inséparable dans son appréhension, notamment dans les catégories populaires, de la dimension économique et sociale, elle s’en distingue tout de même. C’est à cette préoccupation-là que la stratégie « Buisson » (du nom du conseiller de Sarkozy issu de la droite dure) devait s’adresser autour du ciblage des musulmans et de leur « mode de vie » comme menace pour l’identité nationale (viande halal, prières de rue, burqa, etc.).

It's here that I have some difficulty following where their political line leads. On one level they are offering the sound advice that the feelings and instincts of the popular classes cannot be ignored or wished away, even if they express themselves in racist or xenophobic terms. But what exactly is to be done about this? Is the left-wing alternative to a Buisson strategy simply to validate the spontaneous judgments of the "authentic" underclass but without the anti-Islamic overtones? And how is that to be done? By substituting "financiarisation" for "islamisation" and "social" for "societal"? I confess that I am somewhat at a loss to see where this leads. The manifesto concludes on a high rhetorical note, a kind of Mélenchoniste lyricism with its allusion to Sieyès, its apotheosis of the Republic, and its invocation of the universal:

Cependant, être de « gauche », c’est croire à l’égalité sans ramener celle-ci exclusivement à la question sociale mais à ce qui tient ensemble en amont de cette dernière : l’égalité des conditions. La gauche est un moyen pour redresser le pays, et non une fin. Qu’est-ce que le peuple aujourd’hui ? Rien. Qu’aspire-t-il à devenir ? Tout. Au fond, ce qui relie « gauche » et « populaire » c’est la République dans sa dimension sociale et la nation dans sa seule version universaliste.

Do I reveal myself to be a hopelessly jaded intellectual or worse, a social traitor, if I say that I no longer thrill to this martial music? It seems to me to avoid all the hard questions in the name of an empty egalitarianism. What exactly does "equality of conditions" mean? As a Tocquevillean, I know that the phrase can be parsed in many ways. And its power to mobilize is no longer what it was when it stood in opposition to the ascription of status by birth and corporate membership (see my Collège de France lecture). I would like to see la Gauche pop' as something new on the political horizon, but in the end I find that it stirs me as little as the rhetoric of Mélenchon.