France-Amérique
Without Marx or Jesus: the New American Revolution Has Begun.
by Jean-François Revel.
Doubleday. 269 pp. $6.95.
To judge a book by a Frenchman that has “America” in its title by comparing it with Democracy in America is unfair. Tocqueville’s pair of books enjoy their reputation; Revel’s best-seller, little more than an extended pamphlet, will not be read or known in 2109—a date as distant in the future as the first publication of Democracy in America is in the past. In spite of this, the comparison ought to be made, not so Revel can be blamed for failing to measure up, but because it reveals some stubborn similarities in what the U.S. may mean for certain foreigners, especially certain Frenchmen. Also, Without Marx or Jesus is not a worthless book; the comparison helps to determine what it is good for.
Tocqueville (like Revel) came to America to confirm his prejudices. Early notes and letters show he had largely decided, before he came, what America—or rather, democracy in action—must be like. He did not go to America with a vague and boundless curiosity, or as a tourist, and when he returned did not write one of those books (which are still popular in France) about the strange natives he had observed. It took an intelligent reader to appreciate that Tocque-ville’s concern, and value, was in dealing with principles, ideals, forecasts, not reportage or verisimilitude. When the second volume of Democracy in America came out, Sainte-Beuve complained, “For almost ten years since he left Amerca, that country has served no more than as a pretext for the author, no more than a man of straw.” Tocqueville half conceded this. He wrote to Mill, “I wished to set out the general tendencies of democratic societies of which no complete example yet exists.”
But while he wrote in generalities, Tocqueville never wandered very far from the seemingly clear-cut idea—which was his prejudice—that democracy was the wave of the future, and he tried to be pretty specific in forecasting the effects of this international, apparently inevitable process on other countries, especially France.
In America, I saw more than America; I sought the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or to hope from its progress.
Tocqueville had his theory. He said it would work out over the long haul. But although he professed to “have turned my thoughts to the Future” whereas “the parties . . . are busied for the morrow,” he was writing for a contemporary audience and hoped that his books would have an impact on current events in France.
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Whatever hopes Revel has for Without Marx or Jesus (some possibilities suggest themselves), one of the similarities this book has with Tocqueville’s is that in it a country called America is said to be a laboratory in which a generally praiseworthy process is happening for the first time, before taking place in the rest of the world; this process is described in a very general way, and, despite the writer’s aspiration to a global view, his references, his preoccupations, are continually to and with France, and the peculiarities of the French. One-hundred-thirty-seven years ago, the process was democratization. Today, it is “revolution.”
“I traveled,” Revel says, “from New York to California, from the Establishment to the Underground. And the book that emerged from this trip is as much a book on the concept of revolution as it is a book on the United States.” Tocqueville was clear about the effects of the process he said he saw operating: virtual abolition of non-genetic differences, respect for law instead of office or title, the rise of a common psychology that might lead either to the best kind of patriotism or to the oppression of the individual by no one in particular. Revel, pointing at a U.S. in the midst of “revolution” at the end of his own theory, is unclear about what he means by the term. Or rather, he is apparently clear on one page, then contradicts himself, and finally asserts that “revolution” is indefinable and unpredictable, “since it has never happened before.”
Early on, he explains that a revolution “without Marx or Jesus” is one that can be predicted, striven for, and described by means of neither of the ideologies that many Frenchmen go on adhering to, in their way, sometimes concurrently: Marxism and Catholicism. The “revolution” he is talking about will work itself out by hitherto unimagined methods of “dissent” and “innovation.” However, it seems it will achieve an old aim: the guaranteed right to have ideas and express them freely in words and diverse “life-styles.” “Liberty,” Revel asserts, bringing in some old ideological terminology, “is, or should be, the life’s breath of socialist civilizations.” Sometimes a permanent increase in liberty is what Revel seems to mean by “revolution.” Elsewhere “equality” (the second condition in the famous slogan of what is for Revel the first French non-revolution) is what it seems his “revolution” will achieve, with political participation by everyone—democracy as Tocqueville understood it. “The purpose of the . . . revolution is to create real equality among men, and to give to men the political means to decide for themselves on the great matters affecting their destiny.” Revel does not pin himself down. Perhaps the closest that can be gotten to understanding what is meant by the loaded word in this book is a real change for the better.
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The fuzziness of Revel’s “concept” is not so important at first, since his project is clearly not to write a treatise on a topic of political science, but (if his previous work is an indication) to produce a pamphlet that will provoke and amaze. If Revel’s book does not “succeed,” it is because his style of provocation may be better suited for slashing than praising. In Without Marx or Jesus, this style is employed assertively. Like a good pamphleteer, Revel gets the attention of his audience from the first line, by surprise: “The revolution of the 20th century will take place in the United States. It is only there that it can happen. And it has already begun. Whether or not that revolution spreads to the rest of the world depends on whether or not it succeeds first in America.” An American may be puzzled or bored by these sentences; he is not apt to be provoked. They express ideas—or better, sentiments—that have been in the air of late. In the least theoretical parts of his book, Revel offers as proofs some extremely familiar observations.
The moral revolution, the new forms in music, art, and spectator-entertainment are all part of the battle. Sexual liberty, pop music, marijuana have become as much a part of politics as politics has become a part of morality. Pop-musk festivals, of which Woodstock has become the prototype, are explosions of personal and sexual expression, of liberating behavior and music, in which all these elements take on political dimensions.
Tocqueville also relied heavily on fireside chats with American informants (mostly bankers and merchants) who were readily available during his short stay. But Tocqueville never passes on with such a lack of judgment “proofs” like the one just quoted. An accumulation of fashionable, lightweight clichés posing as consequential matter sets up Revel’s book for the criticism Charles de Gaulle is said to have made of a book closely related to Revel’s—Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber’s The American Challenge: “Ces propositions sont lègères.”
If an American is provoked by anything in this book, it is the “facts” that are supposed to support Revel’s thesis. They are the sort a journalist might get from informants on his way through a strange country. “The General-Electric strike [winter, 1969-70] was considered one of the most significant social movements in America since 1930.” Revel does not say by whom the GE strike was so considered. Or again, “In 1967, . . . the hippie population of San Francisco was about 300,000.” A remarkable fact, if true, making almost half of the city’s inhabitants “hippies”; but Revel does not define what a “hippie” is, beyond someone who “dissents” against the “Establishment” and wears strange clothes. No source is given for this statistic.
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Without Marx or Jesus is a bestseller in the U.S., but probably for a different reason than in France. Revel’s book must be mildly comforting for dull-minded Americans; it is irritating and fascinating mainly for a French person, maybe as much so as its author’s other books.
Jean-Francois Revel (the pen-name of a columnist for the weekly L’Express) is a well-known signature in France, synonomous with a brand of writing that expresses contempt for nearly everything French. Very often in Revel’s previous production, seldom in Without Marx or Jesus, an American is reminded of Mencken. Six years ago Revel wrote a book-length polemic against the French that started, “When one travels in France, one becomes aware of how miraculous it is that there are any Frenchmen who manage to think at all.” Revel denied not only that the French are more intelligent than other people, which is often taken for granted, but also that they have better taste. “The average Frenchman,” he observed with relish, “looks as though he were dressed in his kid brother’s shirt, his late uncle’s pants, and a jacket he picked up from a bench on a subway platform.” Of the half-dozen books Revel wrote before Without Marx or Jesus all (with the exception of an appreciation of Proust) were attacks on something French: the French “mentality,” de Gaulle, the “Left,” the “Right.” In his own country Revel has acquired a reputation for being hard to please. He has not sought to avoid it. “This book is entirely negative,” he once warned prospective readers in a foreword. “Those who like positive ideas should go no further.”
When he was “positive” about anything, it was almost always something outside France that inspired him. In a column on French militarism Revel asserted, “America and Britain, with their democratic sensibility, view war as a terrible, painful fact, tolerable only because of its high moral aims.” Taken out of context a sentence like this is open to the type of criticism that whole sections of Without Marx or Jesus are vulnerable to: it makes an American remember things, including Saturday matinees at the movies, that seem to prove that Americans do not “view war as a terrible, painful fact.” But only when the sentence is considered out of context. Until this book, Revel was not “positive” about anything for long. Occasional bits of praise or admiration functioned effectively as tactical devices to chastise and shame the French reader. An American cannot be sure if Revel caressed some masochistic nerve, some sense of failure in his readers that is pride turned inside-out. It is obvious, though, that until now Revel used examples from “America” sparingly; his vocation was to write pamphlets—short ones in L’Express, longer in his books—flaying the French knowledgeably (Revel is highly educated) in a style and with a content suited to this purpose.
Much of the best in French pamphleteering is justified only by its consummate vicious nihilism. But Revel’s work, bright and delicious, has never been bleak like Céline’s, and his arrogant “negativism” has not obscured a “contructive” purpose—to blow the French out of their rut. Likewise, writers vaguely associated with the “Right” have written the best pamphlets, but there have also been contributors (Proudhon) who can be located more plausibly, though not less vaguely, toward the other end of the old spectrum. Revel is one of them. He would not object to being called “a man of the democratic Left,” only asserting that for a long time that party in France has been worthy of nothing but a decent funeral. Following the French custom of the literary man “intervening” in politics, Revel once contested a seat in the National Assembly, running on the Socialist ticket. He came in a poor third’ behind the Gaullist and the Communist. This did not alter his often-expressed belief that the French adore generals and kings, cannot govern themselves, and are hopelessly stupid. Yet Revel seems to have stayed a democrat, like the Tocqueville of Democracy in America, and unlike Mencken.
When harping on the highhandedness of de Gaulle and his ministers, Revel was reminiscent of Tocqueville, who, after finishing Democracy in America (and failing in his first try for election), spent eight years in the National Assembly, always in opposition to the ruling monarchy though unable to find a party he could bring himself to join. The events of 1848 gave him a brief, ill-fated chance to associate himself with the Republic and participate in the exercise of power. After the events of 1968, which seem to have had as terrific an effect on some Frenchmen as 1848 had on their ancestors, a party turned up that Revel aligned himself with, showing more enthusiasm than in his adventure with the Socialists. This was the revamped Radical party under Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber.
Servan-Schreiber publishes L’Express and wrote The American Challenge, which appeared in 1967. There he warned that France was becoming an economic colony of the U.S. due to American technological superiority and de Gaulle’s preoccupation with the past; the only way to halt this development would be for France to drop outmoded nationalism and take the lead in forming a unified Europe capable of competing with the Americans. This book was the all-time French best-seller, from which it could be inferred that some of the French were dissatisfied with Gaullism, or fascinated by America, or both. After the events of 1968 showed that dissatisfaction was deeper and wider than anyone had thought, and also that no party between the Communists and the Gaullists knew how to take advantage of it, Servan-Schreiber went into politics. He was elected Secretary-General of the Radicals, a hulk of the party that had dominated the Third Republic. Heaven and Earth, the platform Servan-Schreiber wrote, goes on from where The American Challenge left off. It is more than a “positive” document—it is positivistic, presenting earnest and attractive-sounding prescriptions for France: decentralization, a true merit system, freedom of information, popular “participation” in the running of institutions, including universities. Many of the examples of the efficacy of such reforms are drawn from America.
Servan-Schreiber made quick headway. Without Marx or Jesus was written when his political stock was high, maybe as high as it will ever be: the summer of 1970. He had taken a parliamentary seat from a Gaullist, right in Lorraine. De Gaulle was dead, and there was talk of Servan-Schreiber facing the heir, Pompidou, in the next Presidential election. But by the end of the year Servan-Schreiber had been badly beaten in another election in which he had unwisely chosen to oppose a much more powerful Gaullist. He resigned his Radical post. Tortuous negotiations with “right-wing” Socialists and “left-wing” Gaullists, aiming to create an alliance, got bogged down. Servan-Schreiber’s detractors might now more plausibly dismiss him as an old-fashioned politician in “American” disguise. The reference is not just invidious, for as well as campaigning in shirtsleeves and a personal jet, he had invoked America as a model for hope and progress. In Heaven and Earth, for example: “America is a world in itself . . . in America hope has always been rewarded . . . we must study America.”
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Servan-Schreiber, like Revel, was actually in an old French tradition when he praised America as the new land where history beckons to be made. This is the typical message of a certain type of Frenchman who risks being embittered (as Tocqueville was) if he goes into politics with the dream of making his country over into a more open and optimistic place. The terms of the message change little. Sixty years before Tocqueville, another of those Frenchmen, Crevecoeur, reported, “Here are no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion. . . . The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles.”
There are always Frenchmen relaying the message, and many others listening eagerly and reacting either with pleased fascination or provoked irritation. Those in Revel’s audience who are surprised and upset to be told that the “revolution” will come from America belong to the species of ordinary French for whom the word “revolution” has formidable “positive” connotations, and for whom the lurid reflection of the U.S. in Sartre or Godard, or on French TV, is convincing, satisfying, and necessary. Some are more energetic: an American visitor in France may be given the lowdown on the U.S. by a French person whose closest approach to this country has been a vacation in Cuba. One learns that it is an article of faith with such persons that any real change for the better can only be achieved outside the U.S., by non-Americans at the expense of American interests. Revel knows his French, and many of the assertions in Without Marx or Jesus are aimed to exasperate such types.
Those wrongly presumed to be quite the opposite of the “revolutionaries” are also apt to be disturbed by the implication that since America is in the historical forefront, the French can only follow. De Gaulle was the magnificent exemplification of the patriot who looked down on Americans as powerful barbarians, hostile to the civilizing mission of France and to the concept of aristocracy. It is not only the Gaullists who try their best to carry on in this tradition, and are therefore offended by Revel; many “revolutionaries,” too, mostly without knowing it, are dismayed that France is no longer at the center of things, and that their own enterprises have become more and more provincial, peripheral, and unimportant. Except in moviemaking, that situation Tocqueville dreaded and did not expect would occur has at last come about. He wished that France would remain “the most brilliant and the most dangerous nation of Europe, and the one that is surest to inspire admiration, hatred, terror, or pity, but never indifference.” No nation in Europe any longer inspires strong feelings. This is a source of some trouble today for more people than like to admit it in the European nation-state that was admired, hated, etc. longer and more vehemently than any other. Even a sincere liberal and good European like Revel, who bids good riddance to his country’s past and tells tales about a better, mythical America, must be a bit unhappy about it in his heart of hearts.
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