Daniel Halévy’s 1931 Décadence de la liberté begins with the confession or boast that the author has only voted once in his life (in 1919). It ends with a funny story about Orientals. The emperor decides that a particular man will be executed by the best, most skilled executioner there is. This marvelous man arrives, the condemned man kneels and watches the executioner flourish his sword. Very impressive, he says, but will it look so beautiful when my head is cut off? Then, of course, his head falls off, having been sliced off without even his noticing. Perhaps we with our discussions of liberté are like that condemned man, still speculating although the stroke has already fallen and liberté is already dead. How, Halévy wants to know, did we come to such a pass?
Why is worth considering, more than a century after some of these texts were written, how an elitist liberal of Halévy’s stripe—that is, a “pétanist historian” (136)—confronted and diagnosed the new mass politics of the 1920s? There are two things happening in Décadence. The first is Halévy’s approach to the 19th and 20th centuries as a historian – how to make sense of them? Then there is the question of liberty, of its failure in the 20th century, which itself is related to this larger problem of understanding. Fundamentally, for Halévy, there are those who should understand and those who should obey – the 19th century’s mistake was to commit itself to democracy, which denies this fundamental truth. Authentic liberté, for Halévy, is not democratizable. And yet Halévy sought always to maintain contacts with the left, or at least a certain version of it. Those of us in the 21st century who are committed both to the value of specialized academic research or expertise and to democratic politics ought to take very seriously the kinds of dilemmas into which Halévy runs.
The book is a product of the 1920s and of Halévy’s longstanding attempt to make sense of the Third Republic. The first of the four chapters, “Vox populi,” was written in 1923, in advance of the elections of 1924. The avowal that Halévy doesn’t vote is followed there by an analysis of the significance and meaning of the major elections that shaped the history of the Third Republic. The aim is to show that, in those cases where it is possible to see the results of the elections as expressing a clear will on the part of the people, that is a sovereign decision – for instance a rejection of the pursuit of empire in Africa and Asia (38-40) – that decision was never respected. There are elections, and then there are those who actually make decisions, but one mustn’t confuse the two. In fact, Halévy argues, there is a pattern to elections, to the distribution of voters, so that we can see elections simply as the reflection or evidence of a social fact (not Halévy’s language). Thus, for instance, although Poincaré is elected after the war as a conservative darling, if we look at the Chamber from which he drew his support, in fact we find (by Halévy’s reconning) 224 conservatives to 370 republicans: “nous connaissons cette proportion, elle existait exactement la même dans la Chambre de 1876” (71, and see 45). Elections are not sovereign actions, they are, Halévy feels, morally degrading and useful only, apparently, to distract the masses and offer a sort of cover for the real forces in French society. Of course the meaninglessness of electoral results leaves us with a problem: “Si l’Etat se disperse, que fera l’historien? Une même gêne atteinte l’action et la recherche” (19). Here is the central problem of the book.
The middle two chapters examine what Halévy regards as the real forces in French society and politics. Much verbiage must be stripped away to get at this material foundation – in a monarchy the writers must flatter one person, in a democracy they must flatter everyone – but it is not inaccessible to research. In “De re Gallica” Halévy takes his readers on a tour of the genuine achievements of the Third Republic, identifying in each case the – état? corporation? – cité, finally he decides, behind each one (122ff). “Corporation contre corporation, voilà la réalité” (106). The immense new apparatus of social legislation, the primary and secondary schools, but also the universities, the empire – each one has its own real substrate. People, not ideas, although in each case people dominated by a certain way of thinking. Halévy wants to be not a materialist historian, but a realistic one: “L’histoire est moin matérialiste, elle est plus romanesque que nous le pensons aujourd’hui. Le francais électeur était hostile à l'aventure coloniale ; mais le francais lecteur de journal la suivait avec faveur. Dans la politique si ennuyeuse de la Troisième République, elle seule n'était pas ennuyeuse » (113).
The fascinating third chapter, “Clio aux enfers” turns its attention to the police. Halévy is interested in this first of all because he is interested in the occult forces that in fact govern politics, and the police are almost definitionally occult. Those in opposition may always criticize the way those in power use the police, but all governments, once in power, love the police. And it is a deep channel, we might say, through which despotism can enter into the regular practices of government. Halévy says that he has himself witnessed police agents provocateurs at work (in 1893), trying to gin up a riot useful to the government. And Halévy expresses skepticism about the number of suicides that take place in jail cells – from colonel Henry during the Dreyfus Affair to the more recent past. Second because, from the perspective of the late 1920s, he is interested in places from which popular authority might derive – in short, if there is to be a dictator in France, where will it come from? Perhaps the police. Perhaps specifically Jean Chiappe, who is popular, who knows himself to be popular? Halévy, it’s important to remember, is after all a defender of liberté, but one who rejects its identification with the practices of parliamentary democracy: “La France est trop pénétrée, trop imbibé aussi, d’idées et de préjugés démocratiques pour qu’un fascisme y puisse réussir. Pourtant le malaise existe, et la recherche et le désir d’une réaction autoritaire » (187). He’s interested in the fascist solution because, indeed, he accepts that there is a profound problem to which it may be the answer. As distrustful as he is of the police – what ought to be a service, become a power – still it is worth considering as a solution to the problem of the masses.
Where are the beginnings of liberalism? Do we see them already in Montesquieu or Locke, that is in the 17th or 18th century, or do we understand liberalism rather as fundamentally a response to the new problems posed by the French Revolution – that is when the word emerged, but perhaps the thing itself is older? Halévy speaks of course of liberté rather than liberalism. For him the 18th century was the century of freedom, where the forms of life available were most varied, even if this freedom was limited to a relatively small part of the population. He quotes d’Alembert from the Encyclopédie to the effect that the world obeys laws that can be understood, and that freedom is to be found through understanding the real laws that really govern the world. This is about physics, but it’s a lucid statement of a fundamental Enlightenment politics. The great gambit of the 19th century, he thinks, was the extension of liberté of understanding to the whole of the people. Parliament, Halévy suggests, is a basically 18th century institution – a group of educated men will sit together and by talking matters out arrive at a satisfactory solution. Inasmuch as we should see most of 19th century French history as a Restoration, this extends deep into the century. Again Halévy says that anyone in the chamber of 1825 would feel at home in that of 1875 – he would see the sons of men he knew well, and even a few familiar faces (Adolphe Thiers, mainly).
By 1925, we are in another world. Parliament is no longer supposed to understand. The central metaphor of this chapter is that parliament is like an electrical system, but through which social obligations flow. It works fine at moderate levels, but when emergencies arrive, “les plombs saute” – the breakers flip, and a dictatorship is required. This is not Schmittian decisionism, although one must imagine that Schmitt read Halévy and perhaps Halévy read Schmitt.
Generally, people are no longer supposed to understand, only to obey. This is a tendency Halévy identifies everywhere in his contemporary society. Parliament of course is no longer a place for understanding and debate, to suggest that is what deputies do is a joke (205ff). The newspapers – that other great institution oof 19th century liberal civilization – are also no longer plausibly described as tools for understanding. Halévy traces the consequences of the discovery, during the Dreyfus Affair, that papers would do better if they simply ignored what was happening politically and focused on the fait divers, together with the usefulness to the powerful and wealthy of owning papers: “L’ancienne presse fourniessait de réflexions et de documents une élite libérale ; la nouvelle fournit de lecture, de papier, un publique qui se laisse faire » -- the presse d’information today conveys its facts with colorful pictures and as few words as possible, like a book for small children just learning to read (216). The substrate of liberal society no longer exists. And new technologies only make things worse. Radio and film are new media that, far from emancipating or democratizing knowledge, are simply and obviously in need of careful control by authority. The contrast here is with the theater which, despite the many attempts of the French state to control it in the 19th century, is essentially impossible to censor because so much of the meaning of the thing inheres not in the words themselves but arrives in the moment of performance, as a sort of aleatory bargain or wager between the audience and the performers (225-27).
There is a sort of technical obligation to simply carrying out the instructions one receives. This isn’t like the mysteries of the ancient world, it is simple obscurity. The factory worker does not stand in awe before the work he is obliged to do without understanding it, his hands simply have to obey. The engineer may seem to be more in charge, but here too much of what he does, Halévy says, is governed by formula from mathematical physics that he does not really understand (233). And in just the same way, high finance appears as outside of all discussion. The settlement of 1919 was not worked out by politicians, rather it was presented as fiat by the financiers: “les décisions de la Haute Banque, comme celles de la science, ne se discutent pas » (236). Human being, man himself, Halévy says, is simply overcome by all this. The dream of understanding and control – which really is of ancient Greek vintage as well as finding expression among the encyclopedistes – is snuffed out. And, Halévy writes, “L’homme qui avait espéré d’être libre, se trouve dépossédé. L’émancipation est manquée, toutes les classes de l’ancienne humanité tombent ensemble, prises aux rets d’un vainqueur invisible” (233). It is difficult not to see here a different and a conservative version of the sort of critique of modern society under capitalism that one finds in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, but with some important differences. First of all, of course, there is the question of the invisibility of this new tyrant. It is clearly, one wants to say, capitalism. But Halévy himself would say that this is not adequate, this is to conjure up an enemy that one cannot really explain, which acts everywhere and isn’t in any one particular place.
Another difference between later critical theorists and Halévy is that he writes in 1930, before the war, before the definitive arrival of Nazism. He is of course intensely interested in the new tyrannies – as his brother Elie called them – which for him are the Soviets and the Fascists. Halévy accepts or at least airs the suggestion that, in France, one possible nucleus of fascism would be the revolutionary syndicalists, especially the more aggressively antidemocratic among them. But he thinks the French are basically too libertarian, and too democratic, to turn in this direction. Halévy accepts the idea, which he presents as coming from a newspaper report – that the success of the National Socialists in Germany is due not really to any of the specific things they say or do, but generally to their capacity to convince people that they will allow Germans to take back control of their country. They name and promise to destroy what had previously seemed a series of more or less anonymous tyrants. This is a return of sovereignty – which, after all, even Halévy understands, is a fantasy – but a powerful one.
Halévy has his own fantasy of sovereignty. This we can see in the line, quoted above: “Si l’Etat se disperse, que fera l’historien? Une même gêne atteinte l’action et la recherche” (19). This is a fantasy not of political autonomy, but rather of a natural object for a history of politics. Halévy as a historian wants to be able to explain, and he wants to be able to explain not a natural process (that would be too materialist) but a human one, which can only mean a process of rational purposive action. Yet is there such a thing in the political realm? As a member of the literati he wants to be able not only to express himself, but to do so in a way that will carry some weight. He wants his own rational discourse to matter in the political realm. He wants to escape the cités that he identifies as French political life into mere inter-corporate competition. He would not be satisfied with the sort of shallow influence that he achieved (172-73) with his late work on the acceleration of history. The natural historical object that he wants is a political realm in which his speech would be effective.
My own suggestion is that this dissatisfaction ought to be a warning to those historians who today wish to assert their own expertise in public as expertise that ought to be compelling in itself. Halévy ultimately managed his own dissatisfaction by simply rejecting democracy in either its revolutionary or its liberal parliamentary forms. This is a standing temptation and therefore a reason to attend, in the mode of self-reflection, to anti-democratic liberalisms of the past.
