336
pages, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., ISBN-13: 978-0307266316
Modern
Americans are by now familiar with the Culture Wars in which Red State
Americans are pitted against the Blue State American (and just how did the
Right get stuck with red, anyhow?). In late 19th Century France, the
divide was between the Tricolour – those
determined to firmly establish a secular French Republic – and the Fleur-de-lis – those who wished France
to remain true to its heritage of “throne and altar”. The most notorious
flare-up on this front was the Dreyfus Affair, but even works of literature,
natural disasters, great feats of engineering, and expositions celebrating
French progress became “cultural footballs” during this time period, as
Frederick Brown relates in For the Soul
of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus.
The
book’s narrative spine, so to speak, is formed from descriptions of three
famous fairs held in Paris in 1878, 1889, and 1900, the longest-lasting
by-product of which was the Eiffel Tower, built for the 1889 exposition
celebrating the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution. We think
of the Tower today as the veritable symbol of Paris, if not France itself, but,
for those who had never fully accepted the radical surgery that the Revolution
had performed on French society, this thousand-foot spire was an unwelcome
interloper in an ancient city that had already lost a good deal of its medieval
character, thanks to the damage from the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War
and the suppression of the Paris Commune (not to mention that boulevard loving Georges-Eugène,
Baron Haussmann). Insults hurled at the Tower included “a disgraceful giant
skeleton” and “an odious column of bolted metal” than even uncouth Americans
wouldn’t stoop to create; more bizarrely, the Tower was held up as the product
of a conspiracy of “cosmopolites”…y’know, Jews.
Just
as anti-Semitism had a long history in Germany before Hitler, so, too, did
French anti-Semitism predate Dreyfus; indeed, the feelings were arguably more
bitter in France because of the longstanding alliance between French government
and the Catholic Church. With powerful republicans pushing to separate Church
and State in France (and finally succeeding in doing so in the early 1900s) traditionalists
felt besieged on political, religious, and cultural fronts. The Dreyfus Affair
combined all three elements, which helps explain what, to a non-Frenchman, must
seem its mystifyingly lengthy half-life. Brown does a fine job of summarizing the
main points of l’affaire Dreyfus, but
it is only one of the many featured elements here; for instance, Vie de Jésus by Joseph Ernest Renan is
seen as an important turning point in the accelerating secularization of French
culture, in addition to being a landmark in Biblical criticism. The early
struggles of the ill-fated Third Republic, plagued from within by instability
and corruption and from without by threats from Left and Right – not to mention
the occasional would-be Bonapartist figure, such as the dilatory General
Georges Boulanger – are all discussed in considerable detail, as are the
financial disasters of the Union Generale
and the Panama Canal Company, which at once left the door wide open for
political and social corruption and stoked the fiery fantasies of those
convinced that Jewish financial intrigue was to blame for each company’s
downfall.
The
most chilling tale of all, from a modern perspective, may be the treatment of a
disastrous 1897 fire that destroyed a Parisian charity bazaar sponsored by
wealthy Catholic ladies. Hardly were the corpses identified and laid to rest
when populists and Catholics alike were busily using them as political pawns,
with the former describing the proletarians who rushed to help fight the fire
as the “true heroes” of the disaster and the latter eulogizing the victims as
martyrs who had died to atone for a sinful nation that had turned away from the
true faith. One can’t but help to think about rapid politicization of Hurricane
Katrina and how uncomfortably close to this event; furthermore, it suggests
that, with secularists increasingly identifying themselves as members of one
American political party and religious believers as members of the other,
America may be headed for the same unholy combination of combined religious,
political, and cultural disagreement coming to be seen as the natural order of
things.
If
anyone believes that this is a good thing, Brown’s book – and a bit of
reflection on the subsequent history of France in the 20th Century –
will quickly convince them otherwise.
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