Better late than never: here are my comments !
- First, some formal remarks: in French, we always say "Tocqueville" and not "de Tocqueville".
Maybe it's too focused on the 89 Revolution and on Rousseau, but it must be because of the documents you had to use...
- A remark of principle: you write about "democracy" in France, but it's in fact more about "republic" than about democracy. It's not exactly the same, especially in France... (well, 1792-1799 wasn't so democratic after all
)
- It leads me to my big idea here: during the period you study,
what was at stake is more the structures and the organization of power and the identity of those in power, not the philosophical and political ideas and the democratic practice.
The Revolution resulted more in giving power to the
bourgeoisie, after having destroyed the (already corrupt) aristocracy, rather than substituting (even imperfect) democracy to absolutism.
The
republican messianism was very strong: see the Etre Suprême during the Convention and in Robespierre's and Saint Just's minds, see la Raison (with a big "R"), see the republican colonialism (yes, during the 3rd Republic, colonialism was more "leftist" than rightist).
The
republican authoritarianism or dictatorship was also a reality: 1793-1794 (not even Marat, Hébert, St-Just and Robespierre, but also the so-called "moderate" Danton), Directoire, Consulate, France in WW1, Daladier government in 1938-1940.
In a way, Vichy is more a consecration of the bourgeois and rural 3rd Republic (with a more and more conservative and entrenched-in-power Radical Party) than a comeback to Ancien Régime or any royalist nostalgia (BTW, Maurras wasn't very influent on Vichy...).
The bourgeois and rural France was afraid of Revolutions and wanted order: not especially monarchical power, but just order. Napoléon I, Napoléon III, Thiers, Doumergue in 1934, Daladier in 1938, Pétain in 1940 fitted well this will of order. And in good periods, Louis-Philippe or Grévy-Ferry or Poincaré or even Herriot were fine enough to let those bourgeois enrich themselves, whatever the form of the "regime".
This rural and bourgeois France wasn't behind the "legitimists" or Boulanger or Maurras: they wanted to make money in peace, not to put back a king in power.
Poujade and Le Pen were popular heroes, not agents for a comeback to the Ancien Régime.
- So, the French Revolution wasn't so much a breaking event, after all. Vichy wasn't either. There is a clear continuity between Revolution, Empire, some aspects of Republics and Vichy.
Of course, I'm exaggerating a bit but consider this:
the problem is France isn't about monarchy vs democracy, but about the fact that every political change is directed from the top (don't tell Hash I'm writing anti-Jacobin things
),
without any deep acculturation inside the people.Political changes go through eruptions, explosions, when the top is too far away from the down; not with a slow path of gradual and consensual changes.
The Constitutional history of France is a series of crises: 17899, 1792, 1793-94, 1799, 1814-15, 1830, 1848, 1851-52, 1870-71, 1946, 1958, 1968-69...
This problem stems from another one, which is more sociological:
the weakness of intermediate bodies and representative structures.
Local powers were powerless during the absolute monarchy, but also during the Revolution and the Republics.
Even before, the aristocracy (which could have been a fine thing, hadn't it been decaying) had already been absorbed by Louis XIV's "Cour", which was in fact a corruption of the monarchical system, not at all a brilliant period for France (outside the financial catastrophe and the military ineptitude). In a way, Robespierre can thank Louis XIV...
The Church and the clergy, as institutions and social movements, were killed in 2 stages: 1792 and 1905. They could have been good intermediates but they were destroyed in the name of another messianism.
Trade unions were always weak and divided in France. In the end of the 19th century, they didn't become strong enough (in a way, Bismarck was a better thing than Gambetta and Ferry
).
Political parties remain weak bodies. The symbolic Radical Party was more a coalition of bigwigs, of national power-hungry men.
The French parties remained weak because of a culture of "providential men", of saviours who can act from the top in the name of the people: after Louis XIV, Robespierre, Napoléon, Napoléon III, Clemenceau, Poincaré, Pétain, de Gaulle, Sarkozy, but also Jaurès and Mitterrand, are good examples of this persistent absolute culture of personal power.
Men like Mandel, Schuman, Mendès-France, men who worked through really democratic, open, consensual methods, were exceptions in France.
So, France hadn't had the American way, with philosophical and political ideas and structures built from the base (at least in the 18th and 19th centuries...).
France hadn't had the British way, with an old parliamentarian tradition and an old consent to taxes and an old bill of rights.
France hadn't had the Dutch or Scandinavian way, with smaller and more consensual societies.
France has had a problem to adopt real democracy, even when it adopted a republican form of power, even when it ruled a Declaration of Human Rights (from the top and practically used against "the enemies of Liberty", whereas it was a theoretically perfect text).
Philippe Auguste, Louis XI, Louis XIV still live in a way in our political system and ideas since the French Revolution...
In a way, after 1750,
France said it changed fundamentally its regime, whereas it only modified the formal way its power is organized...Sure, the Constitutional Council, the 3 "cohabitations" between left and right (1986-88, 1993-95, 1997-2002), the ability to change peacefully constitutional clauses may have opened another period in French history.
But when you see that the messianic side of French politics is still everywhere and perfectly fits the new "democracy of opinion" that medias are imposing, when you see that trade unions are weaker and weaker and that political parties are just tools for "big" men or women, one cannot be much optimistic.
What I'm saying isn't very original as one can say Tocqueville understood almost everything in the 19th century...
