Living in France

I, an American, have been living in the Paris region for almost ten years.  In the age of the internet, keeping up with events and reading in English is not difficult. But finding books is a bit more complicated.

Don’t misunderstand, I can and have read a few books in French. The most challenging was Celine’s Voyage au bout de la nuit, that I chose to read because he had lived in my suburb Meudon, southwest of Paris. Perhaps the most interesting book I read in French is Le Vengeur,  by Hungarian born Imré Kovacs.  Kovacs died after being a long time waiter at the Brasserie Lipp, a famous restaurant in the quarter Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris.  His journalist son found the secret manuscript after he died and had it published.  Kovacs described an extraordinary 20^th century adventure.  During WWII when Hungary was overrun by the Germans he was recruited by the Jewish underground (he was Jewish but didn’t look Jewish) to join a Hungarian regiment of the Nazi Waffen SS as a spy!  He was taken prisoner by the Red Army and finished the war in a Soviet prison camp.  The next adventure afterpeople in the 1830s, Democracy in America, which is still insightful today.  The short book considered here was to be part of a bigger study of his native country France but he died (1859) before completing it. Nevertheless, in it you will find keys to understanding the origins of the French administrative state of today and the society it tries to rule. In particular, that the revolution did not change the nature of the French state, but only its ultimate head.  The key changes that had morphed the decentralized medieval government into a top down Paris dominated society occurred in the 15^th century when Charles VII levied a tax on the peasants without consent of the Estates General.  This increase in central state power follows Robert Higgs notion of the ratchet effect in that it occurred during the Hundred Years’ War with England.  Tocqueville quotes Commynes who said: “Charles VII, who won the argument over imposing the taille [the tax on peasants]when he wished, without agreement of the three Estates, laid a heavy burden on his own soul and upon that of his successors, inflicting a wound upon his kingdom which will bleed for a long time.”  For Tocqueville this was so important that he believed “from that day was sown the seed to practically all the vices and abuses which plagued the Ancien Régime for the rest of its days and finally brought about its violent death.”  Note the relative freedom the medieval system alluded to by Tocqueville is in accord with arguments of, for example, The Bionic Mosquito, that this era might be the best example of libertarian society.  Finally, Tocqueville emphasizes in his description of the system that follows the Ancien Regime after the French Revolution that it retains the centralized authority made up of the middle class, the bourgeoisie.  We can well appreciate his description of this new class that persists to this day in France and especially in Washington.

The government officials, almost all from the middle classes, already constituted a social class with its own peculiar spirit, traditions, virtues, code of honour and pride. This was the aristocracy of the new social order which was already established and active.  It simply waited for the Revolution to open up a place for it.

What already typified French administration was the violent hatred it felt against all those nobles and middle-class citizens who wished to run their own affairs beyond the reach of the government….

Perhaps understanding this history better through great books from other times and other nations will allow Americans to better understand their own predicament today?

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