From Maung Zarni
Oppenheimer's University of California at Berkeley doesn't
care its students are "coding" for US-ISRAEL-UK-Germany genocide in
Palestine.
“What they really want is to silence any mention of
Palestine in the classroom", UC Berkeley lecturer Peyrin Kao told TRT
World that the university administration has shared his name with the Trump
administration as part of a nationwide effort to crack down on pro-Palestine
advocacy on US campuses., Kao, who previously went on a hunger strike in
solidarity with Palestinians and talked about Gaza to his students, now faces
with suspension or even termination
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DRn6hAUjk8u/?igsh=aXd2YnB4b3lnOGZx
Tech billionaire Peter Thiel has spent the last two years traveling the world
speaking
about how the Antichrist threatens global order. (CHANDAN
KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images)
Dear All,
A few links to the deeply troubling reads and YouTube discussions.
Gay and/or immigrant, but enormously successful. You would think they
would have empathy for people who are not part of the established or dominant
groups.
Absolutely not, if you are Peter Thiel, JD Vance's financier who provide Israel
AI-systems to identify targets for slaughter from the sky, among other lethal
systems. Trump is a $$-first businessman - NOT your usual
President or politician. JD Vance is a different, and far more twisted
ideologue than his boss, whom he called "an American Hitler."
Nazi strain is dominant among White Supremacists -
remember his Heil Hitler salute on Trumpian stage ? - while the strain of
Hitlerite Mein Kampf in reverse pervades Jewish Supremacist realm, also
known as Zionists.
White liberal elites have been a major impediment to human
emancipation, something MLK Jr discovered amidst the civil rights
movement. He left his damning observation in writing.
But this has been the Neanderthal hallmark of the liberal
elites since the days of the French revolution - not simply at home, but in
places like Haiti which revolted successfully and built the first
self-liberated sovereign state. The enslaved of Haiti used the same
French Revolution slogans - liberty, equality and fraternity - only to realize
that these high and mighty slogans/ideals applied to the white bourgeoisie of
revolutionary France.
CLR James made an empirical observation - that it was
France's unsuccessful attempt at crushing the enslaved revolt that it was
forced to sell Louisiana, to refill its war chest.
All the beautiful wine regions of France and its wealth were
made possible by France's slave possessions in the Caribbean.
Take a glance at any prestigious university history series
on Revolutions, for instance, Cambridge University Press. You will find
successful revolutions as "world changing."
All of them were WHITE revolution. The Black
revolt that gave birth to Haiti was NOT even mentioned!! In
peaceful existence, the indigenous or peoples of colours were NOT worthy of
Christian moral sentiments - nor the international law as it emerged through
colonialist encounters. In revolt, they/we were all
"terrorists". never revolutionaries or resistance fighters with an
admirable human vision for the oppressed and the colonized.
On Friday, I gave a 2-hr plus interview for a podcast based
in Italy. I shared my Big Picture analysis: that the West is
the greatest threat to humanity.
With its signature criminal White Supremacy, produced and
reproduced over the last 500 years.
There is a direct Neanderthal lineage between the American
neocons - many of whom are staunch Zionists - and the early European
mercenary-looters.
Ideologies aside, invasions always come with material gains,
if the invaders win.
Neocons' total destruction of Iraq's Saddam regime, which
Washington propped up as a proxy against Iran generated billions of $ in
gains. The American Occupation Authorities - a colonial, occupier -
had $20 billion budget, aside from the American control of Southern
Iraq's oil fields. After the Authorities folded, there
was $9 billion, found to be completely unaccounted for. One of the
chief architects of the second invasion of Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz, sat on the
then French gov's oil giant Total, along with Singapore's autocrat Lee Kuan
Yew. Wolfowitz's view of the Arab world of West Asia was no
different from Christopher Columbus' view of the islanders which he came into
contact with in the Caribbean in the early 1490's: they were not really
civilized.
The more things change the more they stay the
same.
Good to be honest intellectually and morally.
Have a great day!
Zarni
Oppenheimer's University
of California at Berkeley doesn't care its students are "coding" for
US-ISRAEL-UK-Germany genocide in Palestine.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DRn6hAUjk8u/?igsh=aXd2YnB4b3lnOGZx
Peter Thiel’s Apocalyptic Worldview Is a Dangerous Fantasy
By
Rory Rowan AND Tristan Sturm
Peter Thiel recently generated headlines with his rambling diatribes about the
Antichrist.
Thiel’s lurid, apocalyptic view
of world politics may be ludicrous or even deranged, but his wealth and power
mean that we can’t afford to ignore it.
===========================================================
Elon
Musk turns Inauguration Day salute into Nazi-themed jokes : NPR
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/23/nx-s1-5269719/elon-musk-salute-inauguration-day-nazis
====================================
Episode 2:
The Frog and the Scorpion
Daniel Soar
28 November 2025
https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/aftershock-the-war-on-terror/episode-2-the-frog-and-the-scorpion?utm_campaign=3977459_20251129ICYMI&utm_medium=email&utm_source=LRB%20email&dm_i=7NIQ,
1, 2D90Z, 2E29WW, 4OGJZ
"Tocqueville ultimately had a patrician, constrained
understanding of freedom: he welcomed the freedom of the parliamentary pulpit
or the New England town hall, but not the freedom of the barricades. Zunz
concludes by noting that Tocqueville’s life was bookended by ‘two great
national tragedies’, the ‘Revolutionary Terror in France’ and the American
Civil War, as if these tragedies were not also moments of genuine emancipation.
It’s a narrative of modernity that Tocqueville would no doubt have endorsed: a
history of democracy made safe from revolution."
ol. 45 No. 22 · 16 November 2023
Bourgeois Stew
Oliver Cussen
3852 words
The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville
by Olivier Zunz.
Princeton, 443 pp., £22, November, 978 0 691 25414 2
Travels with Tocqueville beyond America
by Jeremy Jennings.
Harvard, 544 pp., £34.95, March, 978 0 674 27560 7
Oliver Cussen · Bourgeois Stew: Alexis de Tocqueville
On 24 February 1848, having already forced Louis Philippe out of the Tuileries
Palace, the Paris crowd stormed the Chamber of Deputies, where France’s
political elite was fighting over the remnants of the July Monarchy. A series
of ministers had been trying to form a provisional government under the regency
of the Duchesse d’Orléans, the former king’s daughter-in-law, who was sitting
calmly in the chamber. But the masses didn’t want a regency; they wanted
revolution. Their presence swung the balance of power towards the radical
opposition, which promptly announced the birth of the Second Republic. Alexis
de Tocqueville watched these scenes from his usual position on the upper
benches of the chamber. Despite their swords and bayonets and muskets, the revolutionaries
were too theatrical for him to take seriously; the deputies who supported them
also seemed to be acting in a pantomime of 1789. The only thing Tocqueville
found genuinely moving was the plight of the duchess: when she was ushered to
safety, he recalled springing from his seat and running through the palace in a
gallant but futile pursuit of the royal party. Snubbed by the old regime, he
returned to his seat to watch the ‘burlesque’ and ‘tragedy’ of democratic
politics unfold.
Tocqueville had no particular affection for the Orléans family or the July
Monarchy. But he had an instinctive deference for the symbols of tradition and
order, and a fondness for heroic gestures that evoked bygone eras of
aristocratic grandeur. On a tour of England as a young man, a ride to Warwick
Castle had left him in a state of Gothic rapture: ‘Imagine,’ he wrote to his
wife, Mary, ‘a light breeze, a cloudless sky, a full moon; add to this a fiery
and agile horse between my thighs, centuries of chivalry in my head, and some
of the fire of youth in my veins; and you will know that I didn’t touch the
ground.’ ‘There are times,’ he admitted to his friend and travel companion
Gustave de Beaumont, ‘when I fear becoming mad in the manner of Don Quixote. I
have a temperament crammed with a heroism that hardly belongs to our age.’ His
political opponents, and some allies, resented the way he tried to maintain a
prideful independence in public affairs, as if he were the last noble soul in a
governing class captured by ambition and greed. Many contemporaries suspected
him of reactionary conservatism, or at least nostalgia for the Ancien Régime –
a charge Tocqueville always denied. But some of his more recent defenders,
among them the historian Olivier Zunz and the political theorist Jeremy
Jennings, present Tocqueville instead as a thinker who accepted the demise of
feudalism, and who went further than most in making sense of the society
emerging from the ruins.
This was no easy task. Christopher Clark’s recent history of 1848,
Revolutionary Spring, shows that most Europeans experienced the preceding
decades as a time of ‘flux and transition’. In France, a number of different
political futures seemed possible. Some of these were inherited from the recent
past – constitutional monarchy, Catholic absolutism, Jacobin republic – while
others emerged from the radical movements that thrived in 1830s Paris.
Feminists such as Claire Démar and Suzanne Voilquin wanted to abolish marriage
and the patriarchy. Fourier and his disciples were trying to establish
‘phalansteries’ that would render the division of labour obsolete. The
Saint-Simonians in Ménilmontant were seeking a fusion of free love with the
‘fraternal’ ideals of medieval Christianity and the productive capacities of
modern industry. New thinking was accompanied by new forms of community and
collective action. Excluded from the franchise, which the constitution of 1830
expanded from 0.3 to 0.5 per cent of the population, large sections of the
middle and working classes could nevertheless participate in politics through
newspapers, workers’ co-operatives, mutual aid societies, banquets, utopian
cults and underground conspiratorial networks. Political opinions were at once
firmly held and highly changeable: Félicité Lamennais began his career as a
conservative ultramontane priest, became a liberal journalist, and ultimately
embraced Christian socialism. While the high politics of the July Monarchy were
often derided as lethargic and boring – ‘a bland ... bourgeois stew’ in
Tocqueville’s words – public life was otherwise feverish and unpredictable.
For Tocqueville, this intellectual agitation was symptomatic of a deeper
cultural disorder. The revolutionaries of the previous century had rejected the
institutions and ideas of the Ancien Régime without knowing what to put in
their place. In the introduction to the first volume of Democracy in America
(1835), written when he was thirty, Tocqueville complained of living in a world
‘in which nothing any longer seems forbidden or allowed, honest or shameful,
true or false’ – ‘a world in which nothing makes sense’. America itself was
constantly on the move, due in no small measure to partible inheritance laws
which, in contrast to primogeniture, destroyed the bond between family and land
and forced the dispossessed children of the gentry to break their own ground in
‘the valleys of the Mississippi’. Even everyday language was volatile: old
words took on new meanings, and new words were constantly being invented. There
was ‘no common arbiter, no permanent tribunal’, and therefore no shared
understanding. In contrast to feudal society, where everyone, lord or serf,
remained rooted to the land, and words were ‘passed on from generation to
generation’, life in the democratic age was unmoored, indeterminate, even
meaningless. Tocqueville refused to accept this anarchic new world at face
value. Instead, like a 19th-century Lévi-Strauss, he sought to develop a ‘new
science’ to decode a foreign and seemingly incoherent culture.
Like Lévi-Strauss, he first developed his science while in exile in America.
The collapse of the Restoration monarchy in July 1830 placed Tocqueville, then
an apprentice prosecutor at the Versailles court, in a delicate position. He
was descended from the ancient nobility of Normandy. Most of his relatives were
‘legitimists’ who retained an aristocratic commitment to the Ancien Régime and
a hatred of revolution: three generations of his family were executed during
the Terror; his parents were imprisoned for six months, and only escaped the
guillotine thanks to the fall of Robespierre. Tocqueville himself was not
immune to what he called a ‘hereditary affection’ for the Bourbon monarchy: he
later confessed to weeping at the sight of Charles X being forced out of
Versailles. But professional ambition led him to swear an oath of allegiance to
the new constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe d’Orléans. When asked to
choose a side, Tocqueville, not for the last time, preferred to maintain an
ambivalent sort of independence, and so ended up alienating everyone.
Legitimists accused him of self-interest, while the new government doubted his
loyalty. He found himself socially ostracised and professionally stuck, working
as an ‘obscure assistant judge’ while his contemporaries rose through the magistracy.
America provided a way out. Under the ‘honourable pretext’ of writing a report
on the American penitentiary system, Tocqueville could leave France for a year
and return with a publication that would restore his reputation. He and
Beaumont left Le Havre on 2 April 1831 and arrived in Rhode Island five weeks
later. Over the next nine months they covered plenty of ground, travelling west
to Green Bay and south to New Orleans before heading back to New York.
Some critics have argued that Tocqueville didn’t really get America – that he
failed to notice the early signs of industrialisation in the Midwest, missed
the religious revival among the middle classes of New England, and recycled
conventional opinions overheard at high-society balls. He and Beaumont certainly
kept elite company, their passage smoothed by letters of introduction to New
York shipping magnates, Cincinnati lawyers and Boston bankers. This was, in
other words, a reasonably enjoyable kind of exile. It was also theoretically
liberating. As Lévi-Strauss would himself experience a century later,
dépaysement in the New World allowed Tocqueville to productively exploit the
alienation he had only endured in France. At home, thinking about the political
impulses of the masses tended to evoke the trauma of sans-culottes and
guillotines. But America was a society ‘without roots, without memories’; there
was ‘nothing to forget’. On his travels Tocqueville was able to contemplate –
from an aristocratic remove, but at least without fear – what he called the
moeurs of the bourgeoisie: their habits of mind, morals, daily customs and
kinship structures; their respect for the nuclear family and their obsession
with money. If Tocqueville missed many of the events and transformations that
were taking place on the surface, it was in part because he was looking for
something deeper: the cultural substratum of beliefs and practices that might
reveal the hidden logics and likely future of democracy.
America offered a glimpse of Europe’s destiny, as a place where the ‘great
social revolution’ that was still tearing its way through the Old World had
worked itself out in a comparatively easy fashion. Tocqueville was reassured by
New England’s civic associations and local newspapers: they showed that modern
politics didn’t automatically lead to Jacobin despotism or utopian schemes to
transform society. Democracy in New England was in fact rather mundane,
dominated not by the clash of incommensurate, strongly held beliefs or
charismatic cult leaders but by individual reason and calculation – the
routine, narrow self-interest of commercial citizens. In that sense, the
American future was also dispiriting. Revolution was unlikely to occur in a
society that fostered individualism rather than collective action and generated
unprecedented material gratification. But at what cost? Left unchecked,
democracy meant the predictable administration of an ‘immense, tutelary’ state
and the soft despotism of common sense; it meant that everybody would be
comfortable, safe, equal and bored. This was a radical thing to say about a
form of government that most people associated with emancipation or violent
upheaval. But for Tocqueville it made sense once you looked at how Americans
actually behaved – how they drank alone, read popular novels and hid themselves
away in ersatz antique palaces. There was a ‘monotony’ beneath the agitated
surface of American society, and Tocqueville found it terrifying. As if
anticipating the end of history, he feared that ‘man will exhaust his energies
in petty, solitary, and sterile changes, and that humanity, though constantly
on the move, will cease to advance.’
Biographers and historians have tended to treat these passages, most of which
appeared in the second volume of Democracy in America (published five years
after the first, in 1840), as proof that Tocqueville’s aristocratic disdain
ultimately eclipsed his earlier admiration for American life. In many respects,
though, this disposition was there all along. The first volume is also haunted
by a world that has been lost, not least in its uncompromising account of the
genocide inflicted on Native Americans by European colonists and, more
recently, by Andrew Jackson’s government. Tocqueville had witnessed the forced
removal of the Choctaw Nation from Arkansas, and a trip to the virgin forests
of Saginaw had left him dreading the encroachment of the frontier into the
American wilderness. As the despondent final chapter of the first volume made
clear, the ‘formalities’ and ‘legalities’ of the United States were proving far
more effective than the atrocities of Spanish colonialism at exterminating or
expelling Indigenous populations. Like the European aristocrat, the ‘noble
savage’ was helpless against the onslaught of democracy.
The publication of the first instalment of Democracy in America had the desired
effect. Positive reviews appeared in the French press, and, from John Stuart
Mill, in the London Review. The doors to Parisian salons were now open, but
Tocqueville soon found himself exhausted by the engagements of literary
society, which he considered a distraction from his political and philosophical
ambitions. A first attempt to get elected to the chamber of deputies, in 1837,
failed due to his stubborn refusal to court favour with powerful relatives
(among them Louis-Mathieu Molé, a cousin who happened to be prime minister) and
to an uninspiring campaign. People knew Tocqueville’s name but had no idea what
he stood for: his self-definition as a ‘liberal of a new kind’, opposed to both
‘the friends of order’ and the ‘dirty democrats of our age’, did little to
enlighten even close friends. He was eventually elected deputy for Valognes in
his native Normandy in 1839; the second volume of Democracy in America was
published the following year. For Zunz, this marked the point at which
Tocqueville ‘finally stopped equivocating between his two worlds’ and ‘came
down firmly, at last, on the side of democracy’.
Zunz sees evidence of this new-found conviction in the ‘theoretical acrobatics’
of the second volume. Written at a friend’s chateau (Tocqueville’s own was
being renovated), with America an increasingly distant memory, it largely
dispensed with the ethnographic detail of its predecessor. Instead, Tocqueville
elaborated on what Zunz calls his ‘grand theory’ of democracy, where
abstractions such as ‘association’ and ‘self-interest properly understood’ do
battle with the corrosive effects of equality and individualism. Zunz believes
it’s the former that win out, allowing Tocqueville to find some possibility of
salvaging ‘political liberty’ in an age of conformism and apathy. Jennings
largely agrees, but argues that Tocqueville arrived at this intellectual
ambition by remaining committed to the methods by which he had achieved his
fame. Since returning from New York in 1832, Tocqueville had travelled to
England and Ireland, and then to Switzerland on his honeymoon (he spent most of
it reading Plato, Machiavelli and Montesquieu). Each experience had left him
convinced that the Old World was slowly conforming to the American model. As a
result, he felt emboldened to discuss democracy in universal, categorical
terms. He described his approach in the second volume as an attempt ‘to
consider and judge human affairs’ from the perspective of God.
Most French intellectuals in the 1830s adopted this grand historical register.
Tocqueville wasn’t alone in thinking of his own society as being the product of
a ‘seven-hundred-year process’: Guizot and Saint-Simon also traced the origins
of modernity back to the medieval past, and considered history a power
‘superior to man’. Despite Zunz’s attempts to argue otherwise, what set
Tocqueville apart was his ambivalence about the direction of history. He might
have accepted democracy as a ‘providential fact’, the manifestation of divine
will, but he couldn’t accept it as progress. The Saint-Simonians, Fourier and
Comte – and even the less radical Guizot – believed that looking to the deep
past was a precondition for action; they wanted first to understand the forces
of history before harnessing them to political ends. Tocqueville, by contrast,
always gave the impression of having been conscripted into modernity. He was
opposed to the main drivers of change in the democratic age: commercial
self-interest, the centralised state, mass politics, revolution. The best he
could hope for was minor alterations to the society he had inherited.
By his own admission, Tocqueville’s political career was a disappointment.
Seeking a ‘middle ground’ between the party of movement and the party of order,
and considering himself ‘perfectly balanced between past and future’, he ended
up stranded. Zunz attributes Tocqueville’s struggles to the difficulty of
putting into practice such a ‘demanding’ theory of democracy, which required
the political class to provide an example of ‘political liberty’ for the
masses. A nervous speaker and a naive tactician, derided as aloof even by his
fellow elite representatives, Tocqueville would always struggle to meet that
standard. Yet perhaps the problem was not so much in his character as in his
ideas, which were so suspicious of modern forms of power.
Consider slavery. Volume One of Democracy in America concludes with an extended
denunciation of the institution. By lending ‘dishonour’ to labour, and by
encouraging idleness, pride and luxury, slavery exerted a ‘fatal influence’ not
only on the Black population but on the political economy of American
democracy. Yet Tocqueville had little hope that a solution could be found. A
slave revolution would require violence, while top-down abolition would only
give more power to the central government. As a deputy, Tocqueville
consistently advocated for the immediate emancipation of all slaves in the
French colonies. But he also sought compromise with planters, speaking in
support of reforms which would offer them favourable terms on manumission and
indemnity. Some members of the colonial lobby quoted passages from Democracy in
America in their arguments against abolition. It wasn’t until 1848 that France
abolished slavery, for the second time; just as in 1794, it required a
revolutionary government to recognise the demands of the enslaved for freedom.
Despite frustration with his limited influence and mediocre colleagues,
Tocqueville remained in office throughout the 1840s. Most of his efforts were
dedicated to reforming prisons and education, and to cheerleading the
colonisation of Algeria, which he saw as necessary for competing with the
British Empire, and as a means of drawing French subjects out of their narrow,
private concerns and uniting them behind a national cause. Jennings, cautioning
against the ‘arrogance of hindsight’, points out that Tocqueville’s views on
Algeria hewed closely to popular opinion. But if he viewed colonialism as one
of the few remaining avenues for political liberty, it was because he had such
a narrow conception of what constituted ‘politics’, even by the standards of
the time. Flora Tristan’s organising of factory workers and dockhands certainly
didn’t count; Tocqueville would have seen this as another instance of a
bourgeois intellectual inflaming the passions of the lower classes. Nor did the
chambrées (people’s clubs), gambling rings and drinking societies that the
historian Maurice Agulhon has credited with the spread of republicanism around
the Var and Provence. Over the course of 1847, a ‘campagne des banquets’ had
extended across France as a means of circumventing government restrictions on
public assemblies and overtly political meetings; Tocqueville viewed these
banquets with ‘irritation’ and ‘disgust’. He had no sympathy for the emergent
feminist movement, or for the idea that women might participate in public life.
He repeatedly opposed attempts to broaden the electorate by lowering property
qualifications.
All of which helps explain his dismissive reaction to the popular uprising of
February 1848, which even close friends like Beaumont found excessively
‘gloomy’. Rather than wallowing, however, Tocqueville resolved once again to
‘plunge boldly into the arena’. He was elected to the Constituent Assembly, where
he tried to steer the revolution away from radical republicanism and towards a
constitution that respected ‘property, family, and civilisation’. He supported
General Cavaignac’s bloody suppression of protesting workers during the June
Days, in which more than ten thousand people were killed or injured. And in
1849 he accepted a role in Louis Napoleon’s government, ostensibly with a view
to taming the despotic ambitions of the new president. Instead, he ended up
backing illiberal policies – the suspension of clubs, press censorship and the
declaration of a state of siege around Paris to prevent demonstrations – and,
as foreign minister, was tasked with invading the fledgling republic of Rome
and restoring Pope Pius IX to power. Towards the end of the year he was
dismissed along with the rest of the cabinet, before Louis Napoleon staged a
coup against the republican constitution and declared himself emperor for life.
Tocqueville had long feared this revolution, and its outcome seemed to confirm
his belief that mass politics was more likely to lead to despotism than to
liberty. But there were aspects of 1848 that he found baffling: its theatrical,
parodic rhetoric; the intensity of its violence; its denouement in the unlikely
figure of Napoleon III; and, not least, his own role in its trajectory.
Banished from politics for good, Tocqueville retired to Normandy and wrote up
his Souvenirs, which combine score-settling (his one-time mentor Ledru-Rollin
was ‘nothing more than a very sensual and sanguine heavy fellow, quite without
principles and almost without brains’), self-reflection (‘my dissatisfaction
with myself, my wariness and reserve were taken for presumptuousness, a fault
which makes more enemies than the most glaring vices’), and lucid dissection of
the Second Republic. Zunz alludes to the remarkable similarity between
Tocqueville’s analysis of 1848 and Marx’s in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Napoleon. Both agreed on the culpability of the July Monarchy, which had been
captured by lawyers and financiers; both recognised the inability of the Paris
proletariat and its republican leaders to form coalitions with other classes
and political factions; both attributed the popularity of Napoleon III to the
isolation of the smallholding peasantry; and both saw 1848 as a farcical
imitation of 1793. For Marx, the failure of the revolutionaries to come up with
their own slogans and ideas showed that the working class had to abandon hope
in the bourgeoisie and, eventually, carry out its own revolution. Tocqueville came
to a characteristically despondent conclusion: there had only ever been one
revolution, and France would probably remain trapped in it for generations to
come.
Towards the end of the Cold War, historians turned from Marx to Tocqueville as
their theoretical guide to the age of revolutions. Social interpretations based
on class conflict and economic transformation made way for studies of politics
and culture; narratives of rupture ceded to narratives of continuity. The key
text in this transition, recovered by the polemical revisionist François Furet,
was The Old Regime and the French Revolution, which Tocqueville published in
1856 after four years of reading and research in the Bibliothèque nationale and
the Tours archives. Tocqueville had conceived of the project as a cure for the
‘maladie de l’âme’ brought on by Napoleon III’s coup, and framed it as an
attempt to understand why democratic revolutions always led to despotism.
Tracing his way backwards – from the Directory to 1789 to the Ancien Régime, via
the writings of Constant, Burke and Turgot – he found the answer in the
nobility’s ‘cowardly’ submission to the forces of absolutism. Despotism was
deeply ingrained in France: it had existed in the royal bureaucracy of Louis
XV, was replicated in Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety, and persisted
in Tocqueville’s day, under the guise of ‘modern socialism’. Having cut off the
head of the king, the Girondins and Jacobins of the National Convention
proceeded only to place ‘Liberty’s head on a servile body’. Subsequent
revolutionaries were condemned to repeat their mistake.
The Old Regime amounted to a brilliant reinterpretation of the French
Revolution not as the negation of absolutism, but as its ultimate expression.
It also offered a message that suited the Anglophone intellectual elite at the
end of the 20th century: the supposedly emancipatory schemes of the left are
unserious, utopian and counterproductive; revolutions only make things worse.
Thirty years on, the spirit of the 1990s endures. Tocqueville ultimately had a
patrician, constrained understanding of freedom: he welcomed the freedom of the
parliamentary pulpit or the New England town hall, but not the freedom of the
barricades. Zunz concludes by noting that Tocqueville’s life was bookended by
‘two great national tragedies’, the ‘Revolutionary Terror in France’ and the
American Civil War, as if these tragedies were not also moments of genuine
emancipation. It’s a narrative of modernity that Tocqueville would no doubt
have endorsed: a history of democracy made safe from revolution.
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