For the Soul of France

It was France’s misfortune and originality, a journalist observed in 1861, that since the Revolution every form of government had been regarded as a usurpatory improvisation by one camp or another. Twenty years later, the remark still held true.

As Tocqueville saw it, demagoguery would be the ultimate political expression of a society bereft—of family pride, manners, grammar, local custom, hierarchical structure, religious principles, and sacred space.

“Time in his forward flood shall grow ever more dignified,”

The past was, above all, a refuge from the dangerous mobility of people and things. It was stillness, order, containment. “The qualities I love in the past are its sadness, its silence, and most especially its fixity. Everything that moves disconcerts me,” wrote Barrès (who must have reconciled his aversion to movement with his cult of “national en

The trial served an exorcistic purpose. Having cast out the alien, France celebrated her salvation. Everyone rejoiced, socialists arm in arm with monarchists, and men of the Left proved, if anything, even more bellicose then men of the Right.

Carthago delenda est.

pride. Your science is beautiful, and necessary, and invincible; but you accomplish little by enlightening the mind if you do not cure the eternal wound of the heart.

Another paradoxical courtier, Arthur Meyer, saw only white, the color of French royalty. His paper, Le Gaulois, which circulated like a house organ among Paris’s upper crust, offered sufficient proof of his anti-Semitism to earn him forgiveness for having been born Jewish.

One witness thought that the scene might have been not much different at the Colosseum in Rome when frenzied spectators climbed the Vestals’ tribune to demand the execution of a gladiator, little realizing that France herself was the doomed combatant.