The tale goes that in the climactic months of World War I, an American regiment filed into the trenches to replace a unit of their French allies. As the earth rumbled from the fire of artillery and rat-ridden mud squelched beneath their feet, they realized, astonished, that the poilus had set up a full spread for an aperitif: wine, fresh baguettes, and cheeses. On edge for an attack, the doughboys could not allow themselves to enjoy the delicacies. Their commander asked his French counterpart, “But how can you eat this way when you’re on duty?” The colonel in blue shrugged and said simply: “Are we not fighting for civilization?”
This myth conveys a truth: American pragmatism is bewildered yet admiring in the face of the French devotion to form and beauty. American conservatives have traditionally found this Gallic tendency incomprehensible. Molded by Burke’s Reflections as we are, we tend to reduce France to 1789 and liberté, égalité, fraternité—beguiling abstract ideas wreaking dreadful consequences on the everyday lives of real people. For us, France is plagued by both leveling republicanism and the remnants of a snobbish nobility; she is both statist and anarchic, with 35-hour work weeks being mandated even as the banlieues burn. We like Tocqueville—but mostly because he praised us at the expense of his countrymen.
But Americans should look more carefully at the French tradition. For one thing, French politics and political thinking genuinely is more philosophical than ours. The contrast stems from the fact that Americans, blessed with the oldest written constitution in the world, have until recently treated all political disputes as legal ones. Even our Civil War can be framed as the conflict of two readings of the Constitution: compact and contract theory.
Our leading political thinkers, especially on the Right, tend to be jurists, or they frame their arguments for ready uptake into legal disputes. There are characteristic Left and Right readings of the Necessary and Proper Clause, the Interstate Commerce Clause, the First and Fourteenth Amendments, etc. But, because the French conservative tradition was born in the wake of the complete dissolution of an ancient legal order, it has needed to be systematic and has necessarily sought to propose an entirely different way of understanding and governing society.
The constitution cannot frame all political positions when the French have lived under (depending how you count) between nine and thirteen regimes since 1789. So even those most skeptical of revolutionary abstractions build systems: think of Louis de Bonald’s effort to refute the Enlightenment’s picture of man, or François-René de La Tour du Pin’s development of corporatism to answer Marx, or Simone Weil’s penning a treatise on the priority of duties over rights when asked to write a blueprint for postwar France.
France’s obsession with beauty stamps not just her chocolatiers but also her conservative intellectuals. Ever since Joseph de Maistre’s haunting prose elucidated a providential meaning in the Terror, style has been an acknowledged reactionary comparative advantage. Tocqueville’s limpid, classical lines, full of depth yet expressed with such economy, have earned him a place on literature syllabi.
Similarly, Charles Baudelaire could criticize ‘liquid modernity’ in his poems and compel even his fiercest opponents to acknowledge the beauty of his pen. This is partly a result of the political failure of the Right and the dominance of the Left: when you are far away from governing, you write poetry rather than policy papers. But it has deeper roots: France became a wealthy, commercial society as early as the 17th century, and its monarchy patronized the arts and haute cuisine in the pursuit of dynastic glory.
France is thus the Western nation most conscious of belonging to a civilization—understood as a learned and habituated refinement of human matter toward an ideal good. The French do not simply use the term culture to mean “the mores that are peculiar to a given place or people,” as has become our typical, contemporary meaning. One still often hears the adjectival form cultivé—cultured—which implies that culture is a univocal quantity that one can possess more or less of. No one is truly cultured in this sense who knows no language but his own, who cannot appreciate music or painting, who grasps nothing of Plato.
Hence, the classic French understanding of nationhood—articulated in the 19th century in opposition to Germanic blood-and-soil theories—is of belonging to the same tradition, sharing the same historical understanding, practicing the same mores. This understanding of the nation as properly a site of mediation between the universal and the particular is, perhaps, the greatest contribution of the French tradition: being Hebraic, Hellenic, and Latinate in a Gallic mode. French conservatives have therefore the best chance of articulating a challenge confronting the entire West: at once the great nobility of converting foreigners to one’s own way of life and incorporating them into the body politic, and also the great difficulty of doing so—the sacrifices that such a process demands of both the newcomer and the hosts.
To convey the riches of this tradition in all its political, moral, and spiritual dimensions is the mission of Academia Tocqueville, an annual seminar founded in 2023 by Nathan Pinkoski, a Canadian teaching at the University of Florida, Laurent Frémont, a bona fide Frenchman lecturing at Sciences Po, and this author. Together, we introduce 15 students—drawn mostly from the best graduate programs in America and Britain—to French conservative thought over two weeks in the summer (this year, June 30-July 12).
No program so short can possibly be comprehensive, so the program aspires to convey a great deal by being relentlessly serious, with three to four seminar sessions per day. Most of the seminars are taught by the leading French specialists in the subject matter, such as Academicians Chantal Delsol and Rémi Brague. But to account for how much is often lost in translation between French scholars and Anglophone students, we core faculty take the lead in mentoring participants, drawing on our experiences crossing the Atlantic as scholars and diplomats.
We also incorporate private meetings with leading figures from across French civil society—such as François-Xavier Bellamy, MEP for Les Républicains; Bishop of the Armed Forces Antoine de Romanet; and Council of State barrister François-Henri Briard.
Paris is certainly incorporated into the program, but the historical sites are not mere tourist diversions: we pair a lecture on Bonapartism with a visit to Napoleon’s palace Fontainebleu; we honor the graves of the priests martyred at Saint Joseph of the Carmelites in September 1792; and we toast to Franco- American friendship in the halls of the Senate. In all of this, we are not shy about the fact that the true origins of culture lie in cult—that is, in worship—and so we close Academia Tocqueville with a newly-composed twelve-part Mass, reminding all those present that, despite her sufferings at the hands of the State yesterday and today, the French Church still remembers France as la fille ainée de l’Église.
The Academia Tocqueville is thus a humble, but hopefully transformative, contribution to the vast landscape of summer seminars now available. In pointing students beyond American shores and back to the Continent, we are not denigrating our heritage of English liberties and American constitutionalism. Edmund Burke himself best articulated why the English—and, by extension, the English-speaking peoples—should seek for civilizational sources in France.
Since the Venerable Bede, since Blessed Alcuin of York, and especially since the Norman Conquest, French sources of elegance, culture, and law are also our own; in the words of Edmund Burke to a French emigré:
France has always more or less influenced manners in England; and when your fountain is choked up and polluted, the stream will not run long, or not run clear, with us or perhaps with any nation. This gives all Europe, in my opinion, but too close and connected a concern in what is done in France.
To Burke’s England and Europe, we should add America and the West. Just as Hamilton learned from Montesquieu and Churchill managed to appreciate De Gaulle, let us be true to our tradition by climbing Saint Genevieve’s Mountain and coming to Paris.
This essay appears in the Spring 2024 edition of The European Conservative, Number 30:86-88. It has been corrected to refer to Baudelaire’s poems, rather than novels.
