Friday 24 June 2011

Bourbon Spirit

It won't be online for a week, but John Laughland has a fascinating piece in this week's Spectator about how demographically militant Catholics probably now account for a third of the population of France and are still growing. They and the Muslims have six, eight, 10, even 12 children per couple. The heirs of Robespierre and Chaumette are doomed, there will very soon be no such heirs at all.

Laughland locates this within French rebellion's history of coming at least as much from the Right as from the Left ever since those terms arose in the days of the Baron de Gauville, and even further back than that, to Saint Joan of Arc. He importantly reminds us that of course there were no Communists in the French Resistance until the collapse of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, at which point the Communist Party changed sides along with the Soviet Motherland. The early Resistance was made up of Catholic, agrarian patriots - hardly the near ancestors of global capitalism and American imperium, of course - who were at least essentially monarchists and in many cases explicitly so.

The American Republic, the campaign against the slave trade, both Radical and Tory action against social evils, the extension of the franchise, the creation of the Labour Movement, and the opposition to the Boer and First World Wars, all had their roots in Catholic, High Church (and thus first Methodist and then also Anglo-Catholic), Congregationalist, Baptist, Quaker and other disaffection with the Whig Revolution of 1688, such that within those communities, long after any hope of a Stuart restoration had died, there remained a sense that the Hanoverian State, its Empire, and that Empire's capitalist ideology were less than fully legitimate.

Likewise, the tendencies now expressing themselves as the popular, even if not the elite, bases of Gaullism, of the anti-Gaullist Right and of the anti-Marxist Left have their roots in Catholic, patriotic disaffection with the Jacobin Revolution of 1789 in the countryside and among the workers. That sense has still very far from gone away: France is still very far from fully reconciled to the Revolution's claims of universal bourgeois liberalism, as much in economics as in anything else. If she had ever fully succumbed to the Revolution, then her economic arrangements would be the most "Anglo-Saxon" in the world.

Alas, though, that Laughland expects many of the rising Catholics to vote for Le Pen, and believes that many more will only refrain from doing so out of snobbery. Although intégristes and their fellow-travellers may have been attracted to the Front National, the victory of Marine Le Pen should have put paid to what was always that dangerous delusion, as indeed is intégrisme itself. But where to go? Philippe de Villiers shows increasing tendencies towards neoliberalism and neoconservatism, and managed to be the only person in the entire EU elected to Strasbourg under the banner of Declan Ganley's Libertas, with its cry of "An EU, but not this EU", as if any other were available.

4 comments:

  1. There is no Baron de Gauville in the article. Laughland obviously only aspires to your level of erudition.

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  2. I should be so lucky. His 'A History of Political Trials from Charles I to Saddam Hussein' is breathtaking. Read it.

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  3. Citoyen Louis Capet24 June 2011 at 23:35

    So you don't hold with René Rémond's theories of the Three French Right Wings, then?

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  4. Oh, I wouldn't say that. In fact, I think that he was right, for what my view of such things is worth. Orléanism as bourgeois and economically liberal is the Franco-Whiggery against which stand both the populist traditionalism of the Legitimists and the populist authoritarianism of the Bonapartists.

    But I would not agree (if Rémond really says this, of course - I'm a while away from him) that the only continuation of Legitimism is in the more-or-less Lefebvrist wing of the FN and its electorate. Although Gaullism does have obvious Bonapartist roots, just as Boulangism did, yet it strikes me that the popular followings for either and both were at least as much Legitimist, especially deep in the countryside.

    Especially there, I don't think that the anti-Gaullist Right is entirely Orléanist, either; not for nothing did it most recently rally to a man whose name was not merely Giscard, but Giscard d'Estaing. Not for nothing did Philippe de Villers withdraw from the UDF over Maastricht as surely as Charles Pasqua withdrew first internally and then externally from the RPR.

    And where does anyone think that the popular constituency for an anti-Marxist Socialist Party first came from, or very largely still does come from? Mitterrand could never decide whether he wanted to be Louis XIV or Napoleon, but he certainly wanted to be one or the other. And deep down, at least, one or the other was what huge numbers of his voters wanted him to be, too. Otherwise, he would never have won.

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