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European Diary: Paris, July 2024
On the national holiday of France this year, 14 July 2024, I found myself in Paris on my way home to Reykjavik from Aix-en-Provence where I had given a talk at a summer school on the Nordic proto-liberalism and classical liberalism of Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241), Anders Chydenius (1729–1803), and Nikolaj F. S. Grundtvig (1783–1872). The city was its usual self, with its majestic buildings and monuments, wide boulevards, spacious squares, unfriendly waiters and tasty food. What however caught my attention when I witnessed the celebrations in Paris was the strong spirit of militarism and aggression with which both France’s national holiday and the national anthem are imbued. This is the only Western country which celebrates a national holiday with a large military parade in the capital, with smaller parades in other cities. (The Finns celebrate their Independence Day with military parades, but each time in a different city and on a much smaller scale.) The holiday is set on the so-called Bastille Day which is often regarded as the beginning of the French Revolution. On 14 July 1789, an angry mob stormed the notorious prison fortress Bastille in the centre of Paris. After some initial resistance, the prison governor, Bernard de Launay, surrended. The mob killed him, sawed his head off, put it on a pike and paraded it through the streets of Paris. The prison however turned out to be almost empty, with only seven inmates. Was this really something to celebrate?
Bellicose Military March
On the national holiday, the squares of Paris resounded with the French national anthem, the Marseillaise, which also has its origin in the French Revolution. It is a military march, combative, bellicose, indeed dripping with blood:
Aux armes, citoyens,
Formez vos bataillons,
Marchons, marchons!
Qu’un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons!
Or in English:
Grab your weapons, citizens!
Form your battalions!
Let us march! Let us march!
May impure blood
Water our fields!
It is estimated that around 40,000 people lost their lives in the French Revolution which ended not only in the Terror of 1793–4, but also in Napoleon’s military dictatorship and his failed and costly attempt to conquer the whole of Europe. In Citizens, his excellent book about the French Revolution, Simon Schama writes (p. xv): ‘Violence was the necessary condition of the Revolution, and that from the very beginning, from the summer of 1789.’
Solemn, Elevated Hymn
As I strolled the streets of Paris, I could not but contrast these two symbols of French national identity with the corresponding symbols in my own little Iceland, probably the country with the world’s least violent history. Our national holiday is 17 June, the birthday in 1811 of the leader of Iceland’s struggle for independence, Jon Sigurdsson. In fact, Iceland, originally settled by refugees from royal oppression in Norway, had been independent until 1262 when she was forced to become a Norwegian tributary and later a Danish dependency. Jon Sigurdsson, a learned historian and philologist, in 1848 put forward Iceland’s claims to independence: that the Icelanders had their own language, literature, and history and should therefore have their own sovereign state; that in 1262 the Icelanders had transferred sovereignty to the Norwegian and later the Danish king, but that with the king’s renunciation in 1848 of his absolute power, sovereignty had not been transferred to the Danish people, but rather returned to the Icelanders; and that the Icelanders knew better than Danish bureaucrats what was in Iceland’s best interest. In the Icelandic struggle for independence, not one drop of blood was shed. The struggle was all conducted by arguments, reference to old documents and historical events. Although Jon Sigurdsson passed away in 1879, the struggle continued, and in 1918 Denmark recognised Iceland as a sovereign country in a personal union with the Danish king. On 17 June 1944 Iceland became a republic.
The Icelandic and the French national anthems are also as different as could be. The Icelandic anthem is a hymn, composed in 1874 when a millennium had passed since the first Norwegian settlers arrived in 874:
Our country’s God! Our country’s God!
We worship Thy name in its wonder sublime.
The suns of the heavens are set in Thy crown
By Thy legions, the ages of time!
With Thee is each day as a thousand years,
Each thousand of years, but a day,
Eternity’s flow’r, with its homage of tears,
That reverently passes away.
It is quite challenging to sing the anthem because of its large vocal range, but it is a splendid, solemn and elevated—and elevating—piece of poetry and music, with not a hint of aggressiveness or arrogance.
Sophisticated Conservative-Liberal Tradition
Undeniably, the French national spirit has a militaristic, dirigiste and authoritarian streak: Colbertism, named after Lewis XIV’s Finance Minister, implying excessive taxation and regulation; Jacobinism, the democratic despotism of the French revolutionaries; and Bonapartism, a political duet for two performers only, the almighty dictator and the nominally sovereign people. But France also has a strong and sophisticated conservative-liberal tradition, much richer sociologically and historically than the rather insipid English utilitarianism, as I had indeed pointed out in my talk in Aix-en-Provence, before I arrived in Paris. Benjamin Constant (1767–1830) contrasted the freedom of the moderns with the freedom of the ancients, individual protected domains on the one hand and the self-government of a small collective on the other. Frédéric Bastiat (1801–1850) brilliantly refuted economic protectionism. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) dealt with the problem how liberty and equality could be reconciled and found the solution in the flourishing civil society of the United States. Bertrand de Jouvenel (1903–1987) contrasted the wise rex, St. Louis sitting under an oak in Vincennes, dispensing justice to his subjests, with the ambitious dux, Napoleon riding a horse in Arcola, leading his army into battle.
Constant rejected the idea of another Swiss-French thinker, Rousseau, who had ‘furnished deadly pretexts for more than one kind of tyranny’. Against Rousseau, Constant pointed out ‘that in handing yourself over to everyone else, it is certainly not true that you are giving yourself to no one. On the contrary, it is to surrender yourself to those who act in the name of all’. Tocqueville provided the striking explanation of the French Revolution that it was the direct historical outcome of centralisation where the kings had gradually eliminated the intermediary institutions between the individuals and the state. The absolute King gave way to the absolute ‘People’, or rather to those who seized power in the name of the People. Tocqueville’s verdict on the revolutionaries was damning, but fair: ‘These writers were naturally tempted to indulge unreservedly in abstract and general theories of government. They had no practical acquaintance with the subject; their ardours were undamped by actual experience; they knew of no existing facts which stood in the way of desirable reforms; they were ignorant of the dangers inseparable from the most necessary revolutions, and dreamed of none.’ As I observed the festivities in Paris on 14 July 2024, I could not but think that France would do well to appreciate this conservative-liberal tradition instead of applauding the symbols of the failed French Revolution.