Decadent Ideology, Decaying Fraternity

French Catholic philosopher Chantal Delsol, a member of France’s prestigious Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, is known for her searing accounts of totalitarian ideology and her penetrating works on modern European politics and culture that richly reward any reader who gives them close attention. Over the years, many of her books have been translated into English, including Icarus Fallen: Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World and The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century: An Essay on Late Modernity. Her latest work to be translated into English, Prosperity and Torment in France , is an analysis of the current state of affairs in French politics, economics, and cultural life that reveals key lessons for modern democracies around the world.

In particular, Delsol examines the seeming paradox of a wealthy France, whose people are unsatisfied with the current state of affairs despite the almost unrivaled free social services provided to its citizens. On one level, the book is a grim account of a nation that has become historically defined by various ideologies, turning even good ideas and political forms like republicanism into rigid concepts closed to further political development. In a style reminiscent of Tocqueville, Delsol considers how the French people are caught between the tremendous benefits provided by the government and their devotion to ideological abstractions like egalitarianism, individualism, and secularism.

“France,” Delsol declares, “is a country that is particularly smitten with ideologies. It prefers ideas to reality.” She remarks that “Marxism was so entrenched that it was necessary to wait until the fall of the Berlin Wall for it to fade away: only universal ridicule could put an end to it, but certainly not the lucidity of our brilliant brains.” Delsol describes how in a widespread appeal to a “farcical Marxism,” French domestic politics was dominated from 1972 into the early 1980s by the “Programme commun” or “Common Program,” signed into law by the French Socialist Party, the Communist Party and the Radical Party of the Left.

France’s national motto, “Liberté, égalité, fraternité,” originated during the Revolution of 1789. In this book, Delsol describes in withering detail how these ideological formulae have become closed and seemingly incapable of answering the severe challenges that confront France in the twenty-first century. France cannot afford to stand still or act as if these new controversies can be dismissed with the stand-pat answers that it has developed for decades, if not centuries.

The author also notes that “it is so good to live in France.” French citizens are “pampered by a welfare state the likes of which exists nowhere else.” Its citizens “do not pay for health care, or schooling.” France has some of the highest levels of welfare spending in the world, but also an economy with a high GDP and a significant level of economic redistribution. She observes that “French grief is incomprehensible in the face of the ‘fortune’ and the abundance that can be objectively verified. However, if a self-governing people orients itself politically by modern ideologies of egalitarianism or humanitarianism, it will be perpetually disappointed. [She concludes that] … this grief comes from a propensity to expect perfection here below—the habit of an ideologue.” The author anticipates that many will find her analysis “pessimistic.” Though she shares her belief that a nation with France’s history and longevity can reform itself, it cannot do so without “lucid diagnostics.”

Delsol observes that France’s decline from being part of the leading cohort of nations to a mid-tier power has been difficult to endure. She also remarks that other values specific to “eternal” France are also fading. Delsol notes that the weight of its celebrated national education system now burdens the nation with its abundant mediocrity and declining performance. Delsol concludes that the suboptimal results are because of top-down control, and a purported ability to deliver free education at all levels with minimal cost consciousness guarantees. Yet, to critique it or to openly suggest that the stringent limits placed on private education should be lifted is to risk public censure. The social justice good that public schools supposedly serve endures in the national psyche, despite years of poor results. This, despite the angling and maneuvering by those with means to get into the best government schools or pull strings and gain admission to one of the few private school slots.

Likewise, the vaunted nature of the republican ideal in France also seems stilted, ideological even, in a country of tremendous individualism. France is starting to resemble other Western countries, and this has produced the impression that their national substance is being stolen from them. Less republican, egalitarian, and exceptional, what then will be left of France?

Delsol argues that republicanism requires generous actions, not ideological control over people. If citizens do not freely choose to place the country first, then forcing such actions smacks of authoritarianism. Yet French citizens now freely indulge in a technologically driven individualism, making it almost impossible to envisage the civic fraternity needed to make the republican ideal possible. No one, though, will admit to a reduced identification with republicanism. Delsol wonders why the former trappings of republicanism no longer captivate French hearts. She answers that republicanism as a government ideal has become ideologically corrupted.

Republicanism in France replaced the socialist ideal with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Until that moment, the national imagination was socialist, Delsol informs. Republicanism became something of a substitute for Marxism for leading intellectuals. This can be seen in how republicanism, which is always tied to a concrete place, a country, and for a specific people and their virtues, was reconceived as a humanitarian universalist program. Republicanism was for the world; thus, the spectacle of French youth, Delsol reports, rushing to various ports of entry to protest on behalf of migrants entering France. The French Republic must automatically accept them. But from socialist histrionics to republican humanitarianism are the “moments of great hope and moments of great bitterness.” France loves “the union of hearts in comparison with people’s freedom.” True, it seems, but the French nation in Delsol’s analysis suffers from a profound deficit of encountering reality on its truthful terms, choosing instead to attempt to fill reality with an exaggerated political longing.

Delsol argues that, in a period of individualism, the republican form must incorporate a “high degree of democracy.” The ideology of French republicanism is failing because it lauds an abstract sense of social justice and the common good at the expense of concrete local, religious, and even racial commitments; Delsol suggests that the solution is to extend citizens a greater freedom of choice than that currently offered by the French state. Only in this manner can the union of republicanism be open to a citizenry that no longer wants to ask the state for permission to engage in various commercial, educational, and consumer pursuits. However, another paradox emerges with this argument for greater individual liberty, and that is the French citizenry’s love for equality, which is necessarily threatened by perhaps allowing more options and choices in healthcare, schooling, work, and commerce. Can the French publicly admit that more substantial options are needed other than those provided by the government? The remedy itself is a threat to still cherished but hardly flourishing social settlements.

Delsol notes that France is a disciple of the sixteenth-century thinker Jean Bodin, who emphasized centralized sovereignty of the state as opposed to that of Bodin’s contemporary, German thinker, Johannes Althusius, of the same period, who articulated a federalism and subsidiarity thesis of actions by people in intermediate groups and associations. The French rationalistic conception of state control leads to remarkably different outcomes from the subsidiarity model, Delsol concludes. One of those outcomes is an isolating individualism that results from the existence of only two densities: man and the state. “Centralization increasingly produces the need for the state.”

The individual becomes less, losing agency and direction, requiring increasing assistance from the state. Such is the direction of French politics, Delsol articulates, which evolved dramatically in the age of the twentieth-century welfare state, whose existence continues unabated into the present day. The result is maternalistic government. Delsol argues that this path can be tied directly to the French Revolution, which consisted of a regicide and then a coalescence “around the symbol of Marianne, the mother of the republic.” The arts of association were never possible in post-revolutionary France, as associations and corporations were abolished, leaving individuals solitary and reduced to their own capacities. Delsol pointedly asks, “What else can the individual do, without the right to associate when acting?” Consequently, the citizens are reduced to the welfare state and begging a maternalistic government to meet every need. The citizens have an “infantile attitude” constantly demanding more resources from a state that is always giving and promising. The state as mother and the citizen as infant need one another.

Delsol states that such servility to the government undergirds the French preference for “equality to liberty: they prefer everyone to be dealt with in the same manner.” The republican ideal in France requires one standard for everyone to maintain a proper political union. In the face of declining quality of public services and mounting debt, most French citizens still want the state “to decide for everyone about minimum wages, working hours, school curricula, retirement age, and so on.” The French would prefer the unemployed to be equally cared for by the state on a large level rather than be thrust into competitive employment situations and risk inequality, or work in “little jobs.” Delsol’s damning observation entails that freedom and responsibility for one’s life are removed from any conception of citizenship.

Such egalitarianism extends even to philanthropy, where it is done quietly for fear of offending people with displays of financial inequality. State subsidies are the first-order method for helping various causes. This even extended to donations to repair Notre-Dame Cathedral after the 2019 fire, where the public turned against anyone “chasing after glory” by making significant donations. Again, state grants for such repairs were foremost in their minds. The Pinault family (owner of luxury goods, fashion houses, Christie’s auction house, travel companies, and vineyards, among many others) announced that it would not seek a tax deduction for its considerable gift to the repair of the Cathedral. One of the wealthiest families in France wanted to announce its equal status with everyone else.

Yet considerable threats continue to mount to the French political model. The left-right divide now faces both communist and reactionary populist elements that capitalize on the deep mistrust that exists in French society for the justice system, unions, corporations, Parliament, and the rich. A system built on corporatism at the expense of the human person’s freedom is now seen as corrupt and governing at the cost of the public. The left-populist elements offer more government services and programs, more statism. But the right-populist element proposes to make the French nation the center of its rule. One struggles to see either populist movement engaging in the economic, education, and welfare state reforms described by Delsol to raise the quality of services, increase choice, and spark growth.

The secularism of French life faces a challenge posed by the millions of Muslims who have been given entrance to the country and who report in polling data and behavior great loyalty to the Koran and a much lower level of belief in the French constitution. In a less emphatic vein, rising numbers of young French citizens, despite the pressures placed on them to abdicate their Catholic faith or at least keep it private, remain loyal to the church. While Catholicism is undoubtedly weak in French life, and this by dint of political atheism dominating the country for over a century, perhaps the laity are rebounding in their faith as they watch former national promises made come apart at the seams.

But the most dramatic pressure comes from the challenge to French humanitarian values that undergird the European Union project. The populist right counteroffer is home, a concrete place called France, which can’t be rearranged by migratory flows, climate change regulation, and a flattening of human life without any sense of history, loyalty, and love. French President Emmanuel Macron surely senses this when he refers to the National Rally party, formerly the National Front party, as the “enemy.” Delsol notes that Macron isn’t engaging in democratic politics, which makes way for alternatives, but in a style that leads to “a war against all.” But if the French economic and social model is under duress, if not on the brink of collapse, and its defenders refuse to change, then the next metamorphic change in political leadership in France will likely have to be won decisively.

The only question is if the populists have a program that can restore common sense by giving voice to French citizens who want their country’s sovereignty enforced and expanding freedom and virtue in a manner suitable to the restoration of the nation. The French nation, so heavily defined by an interwoven collection of ideologies, will have to become less. A nation of independent citizens, creatures, family members, and workers will have to become more.