On all that our Revolution and existence owe to the French.
Even before the recent controversy
surrounding the Iraq War and the resulting boycotts (including perhaps the
silliest action ever taken by Congress, the renaming
of French fries as Freedom fries in the House of Representatives’ cafeteria),
there was a pretty sizeable cottage industry in American politics and culture
devoted to belittling and even attacking the French. Perhaps the most common
critiques stemmed from World War II, and specifically the idea that the French
had quickly folded in the face of and then formed a puppet government in support
of Hitler; although the more pro-American narratives tended to emphasize
instead that the US military had swept in to save the French at the end of that
war (and in some narratives, by extension but with significantly less accuracy,
in World War I as well). But in a number of other cultural arenas, including
language and film, there have likewise long existed narratives of French
elitism and snobbery, as illustrated (if with more satirical self-awareness
than most such narratives) by a line in Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad (1879): “In Paris
they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in
making those idiots understand their language.”
As with any negative perspectives
on another culture and community, these attitudes have revealed far more about
America than they ever could about France. But in this particular case, they
have also depended on a pretty thorough elision of two distinct but equally
crucial ways in which America’s founding identity and Revolutionary existence
depended on Frenchmen. While the founding ideas and core elements captured in
the Constitution have been rightly linked to a number of significant political
and social theorists and thinkers, none has more of a presence in our nation’s
defining document than Charles-Louis
de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, and especially his book The Spirit of the Laws
(1748). The core of that book represents an argument for why the separation of
powers into legislative, executive, and judicial bodies, all bound by the rule
of law, could best keep a government from turning into despotism; Montesquieu
(as he is usually known) was the first and most prominent thinker to develop
that concept, and if any single feature best defines America’s political system
as articulated in the Constitution, it is its separation into three equal, balanced,
law-bound branches. Moreover, many of the broader ideas on which Montesquieu
touched in Spirit, including a sense
of the law as profoundly open to reform and improvement, a belief that it is
generally a mistake to base civil laws on religious principles, and an emphasis
on the need for religious tolerance both in the state and between different
religions in a society, likewise became central to both the Bill of Rights and
the general concept of the Constitution as open to and in fact defined by the
promise of continuing amendment.
There likely wouldn’t have ever
been a Constitution, though, if it weren’t for another Frenchman, Gilbert du Motier,
the Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834). Lafayette was a twenty-eight year old
military officer in the fall of 1775 when conversations were taking place all
over Paris about the opening salvos of the American Revolution and what role
France should play in it; influenced by one voice in particular, Abbé
Guillaume Raynal, and his support for the rights of man and America’s
cause, as well as by what he later called his own immediate sympathies (“when I first
learned of that quarrel, my heart was enlisted”), Lafayette spent the next
two years working with an American agent (Silas Deane) and various powerful French
relatives to find a way to join the American military. He was successful, and
between 1777 and 1781 fought with and led American troops in many of the
Revolution’s most significant battles, including Brandywine (where he was
wounded but still organized an orderly retreat that kept the army from total
disaster), Monmouth (one of the first genuine American victories, and one where
Lafayette’s strategic awareness and quick actions alerted Washington to the
opportunity for victory), and Yorktown (where the arrival of the French fleet,
due almost entirely to Lafayette, essentially sealed Cornwallis’s surrender and
the end of the war). And his contributions did not end there—in the years after
the war Lafayette remained very close with Washington and Jefferson (among
other founding figures), toured most of the new United States, and spoke and
worked on behalf of a strong federal union, as well as the emancipation of slaves
and peace treaties with Native American tribes. The honorary citizenships that
he was granted by many states during these years could not be more appropriate;
despite his subsequent return to France Lafayette was, in many ways, one of the
first and certainly one of the most impressive Revolutionary Americans.
Part of the reason for our history
of anti-French sentiments is, it seems to me, a desire to define the United
States through negation, in contrast to other nations; Mitt Romney famously
remarked during the 2008 presidential campaign that “Barack
Obama looks to Europe for a lot of his inspiration; John McCain is going to
make sure that America stays America.” But as with virtually every aspect
of American history and culture and identity, the truth about our founding is
that it was strongly influenced by, and really created out of, many other
cultures and communities, with none more influential and foundational than the
French. Je suis un American! Next Revolutionary reality tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Other Revolutionary histories or stories you’d
highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment