FORUM: 'Frenchmen in America: How Alexis de Tocqueville and Jacques Maritain Discovered America'

Below is a reflection of Dr Samuel Gregg, Research Director of the Acton Institute, presented in Rome on May 30, 2018:
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Frenchmen in America:

How Alexis de Tocqueville and Jacques Maritain Discovered America

Dr. Samuel Gregg

Research Director, Acton Institute

INSTITUT FRANÇAIS – CENTRE SAINT-LOUIS

Rome

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

© Samuel Gregg 2018. Not to be copied or distributed without the author’s permission.

Introduction

Thank you to the Institut Français-Centre Saint-Louis for their sponsorship of this event. I am also very happy to be speaking on the feast day of Saint Joan of Arc, patroness of France and of soldiers.

My topic is a theme which has long fascinated me: the way that some French scholars have understood the American Experiment in ordered liberty, to which France helped give birth, better than many Americans themselves. And the two figures which I would like to reflect upon with you this evening were among the foremost French thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth century respectively.

At first glance, Alexis de Tocqueville and Jacques Maritain would appear to have little in common. An aristocrat from one of France’s oldest families, Tocqueville had many doubts about the truth claims of Christianity, though we have good reason to believe that he returned to the Catholic faith on his deathbed. Tocqueville also wrote very much as what we would call political sociologist, even a type of political scientist. Though obviously familiar with Christian sources and thought – indeed, he never stopped attending Mass – it’s clear that he was as much influenced by reading Rousseau, Voltaire, and especially Montesquieu as he was by reading Augustine.

By contrast, our second figure, Jacques Maritain, was raised as a Protestant. For a time, he was an agnostic before converting to Catholicism in 1906. Aristotle and Aquinas were Maritain’s lodestones, and his thought forms part of that great revival of Thomas Aquinas’ thought occasioned by Leo XIII’s 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris. A fierce critic of Voltaire and even more so of Rousseau, Maritain authored over 60 books, which focused on subjects ranging from metaphysics to the nature and role of the state. Maritain was also viewed as a type of representative of 20th century Catholic intellectuals. It was not a coincidence that Pope Paul VI presented his “Message to Men of Thought and of Science” at the end of Vatican II to Maritain.

These differences in background and interests should not, however, distract us from some similarities between the two men. Apart from being scholars, Tocqueville and Maritain were very involved in public life. Tocqueville was a member of the Chamber of Deputies during the July Monarchy and a member of the Constituent Assembly of 1848 during the Second Republic. He also participated in the Constitutional Commission which wrote the new Constitution of the new short-lived republic. Tocqueville was a vocal supporter of General Louis-Eugène Cavaignac’s use of the army to suppress the workers uprising in Paris in what came to be called the “June Days.” As a member of the parti de l’Ordre, Tocqueville served as minister for foreign affairs in the government of Prime Minister Odilon Barrot under Prince-President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte.

Maritain’s involvement in politics was also very public, especially for a Catholic theologian. For a while he was associated with the royalist-nationalist movement Action Française, but broke with it following Pius XI’s condemnation of Action Française in 1926 and the placing of its newspaper and several of Charles Maurras’s books on the Index. In the late 1930s, Maritain’s unwillingness to enthusiastically endorse the Spanish nationalist cause during the Spanish Civil War was noticed. In 1940, Maritain rejected the Vichy regime and endorsed Free France relatively early. After World War II, Maritain was appointed French Ambassador to the Holy See by General Charles de Gaulle, and played a role in the development and drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Much of his writing inspired the growth of Christian Democratic movements throughout Western Europe as a way of uniting Catholics, Protestants, and others anxious to establish a bulwark against Communism.

At the end of their lives, both men were somewhat disillusioned with various endeavors with which they had been associated. Tocqueville was unhappy with the state of French politics under the military-backed regime of the now-Emperor Napoleon III, and worried by the fact that so many erstwhile defenders of liberty, including members of his family and many Catholic clergy, had become fervent supporters of the Emperor. Likewise, Maritain was disturbed at the state of the Catholic Church, especially in France, when he died in 1973. This is evident from one of his last books, Le paysan de la Garonne. Un vieux laïc s’interroge à propos du temps present (1966). Here Maritain expressed his distaste for the influence of particular German thinkers upon post-Conciliar Catholic intellectual life. Maritain also saw the beginnings of the emptying out of the Christian dimension of Christian Democratic parties.

Yet despite their disenchantment with much of the world, Tocqueville believed in what he would have called the ways of Providence and Maritain took very seriously the Christian theological virtue of hope. And one sign of potential optimism for both men was America. Tocqueville and Maritain were fascinated by America: not just by American politics but also the particular forms assumed by democracy in America, the political culture of America, the place of liberty in that culture, and the role played by religion in shaping and maintaining liberty in America.

In our short time today, I’d like to highlight three aspects of the America they witnessed which impressed themselves upon Tocqueville and Maritain, despite the distance in time between Tocqueville’s famous Democracy in America and Maritain’s far less well-known Reflections on America, published a century after Tocqueville’s death.

The first concerns their views of how American economic life reflected some basic moral commitments to freedom. The second involves the way in which both men identified the American habit of association and its roots. The third concerns their treatment of the place of religion in American society.

An Economy of Liberty

Tocqueville’s magnum opus Democracy in America is primarily known for its insights into the question of why democracy in America had effectively worked and not collapsed into anarchism or the search for a strong man. Far less attention has been paid to Tocqueville’s assessment of American economic life, even though it was one of the features of life in the United States which most impacted his outlook on America.

When Tocqueville visited the United States in the early 1830s, he was stunned—stunned—at the spirit of enterprise that characterized the Republic. Americans, Tocqueville soon grasped, were something that was harder to find in continental Europe. Americans, he said, were a commercial people.ⁱ

At first Tocqueville thought Americans—particularly New Yorkers!—were obsessed by the pursuit of wealth. Yet after a few weeks, he noticed something else about American society. For all their apparent concern with acquiring riches, Tocqueville realized that American merchants were quite religious, unfailingly polite, surprisingly well-informed about foreign affairs, and possessed strong philanthropic instincts, a respect for education, and a taste for fine art and good conversation.

Another feature of American economic life which impressed Tocqueville was the degree to which commerce was seen as integral to America’s attachment to liberty. “Americans,” he wrote in Democracy in America, “do regard their freedom as the best tool of and the firmest guarantee for their prosperity.”ⁱⁱ In that regard, Tocqueville noted, they reflected a more general pattern that had been underscored a century earlier by Montesquieu. “I doubt,” Tocqueville stated, “if one can cite a single example of any people engaged in both manufacture and trade, from the men of Tyre to the Florentines and the English, who were not a free people. There must therefore be a close link and necessary relationship between these two things, that is, freedom and industry.”ⁱⁱⁱ

Some may quibble about the general empirical applicability of that last statement. But in America’s case, the concern and appreciation for commerce and economic freedom more generally has always formed a major part of the canopy of causes that associate themselves with movements to limit government power. One cause of the American Revolution, for example, was the American colonists’ resentment of the strictures placed upon their economic life by Britain’s adherence to the distinctly government-orientated economic system otherwise known as mercantilism. Perhaps it is not a complete coincidence that the Declaration of Independence and the book most associated with the modern case for economic liberty—Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations—were published in the same year. They partook of the dominant spirit of the time: a love for liberty.

126 years after Tocqueville’s journey to America, the United States encountered by Jacques Maritain had changed a great deal. America had become the largest, most industrialized economy in the world. At the same time, the Federal Government had radically expanded its role in the economy since the 1930s, in ways that, I think that we can safely say, would have puzzled not only Tocqueville but also the American Founders.

And yet, despite these changes, Maritain noticed something else. Like many Western Europeans, Maritain had hitherto believed that Americans were highly materialistic. But even before he was appointed French ambassador to the Holy See in 1945, Maritain stated, based on his experience of living for different periods in the United States, that Americans “are the least materialist among the modern peoples which have attained the industrial stage.”^iv

The myth of Americans as highly materialistic, Maritain stated in Reflections on America, was “a fable” that many Western Europeans had uncritically accepted and contributed to spreading So strong was this myth that Maritain claimed many Americans themselves had come to believe it. At the root of this mistake, Maritain argued, was “an old prejudice,” one which involved “confusing spirituality with an aristocratic contempt for any improvement in material life (especially the material life of others).”^v

Maritain did not deny that there was a type of materialism in American society. But Maritain’s point was that materialism was “in no way specifically American.” To his mind, “exactly the same symptoms, in relation to similar sociological or psychological areas, leap to the eye everywhere (especially in Europe).”^vi

Having disposed of that myth, Maritain proceeded to underscore something that Tocqueville had highlighted, albeit with some different emphases. Maritain noticed, for example, just how hard Americans worked. Since first encountering America, Maritain stated, he had “come to realize more and more the immensity of the human effort which was brought into play to create a new world within the course of two centuries, to give to half a continent a material and moral equipment fit to free men and to build a civilization really and genuinely original in character capable of astonishing, captivating and seducing the hearts of men.”^vii

In these words, we see the same awareness of how the American economy reflected Americans’ attachment to freedom which we find in Tocqueville. In that connection, Maritain observed something else. And that was what he called the “the creative work” of Americans “and the process of self-creation through which it unceasingly continues.”^viii

Creativity, entrepreneurship, self-transformation, even a sense of restlessness—all these features of American economic life had been observed 126 years earlier by Tocqueville, and, like Tocqueville, Maritain perceived these as pointing to some distinctly non-economic features of America society which many Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, curiously enough, themselves seemed somewhat unaware of.

An Associational People

A people who devoted to commerce, to economic liberty, to expanding the economic frontiers of the nation might be accused of having little time for those who are less fortunate in economic life, of those who are on the margins of society, and who, for many reasons beyond their control, are unable to advance themselves economically.

In the case of Tocqueville, however, one of his most important insights into America was that Americans had a very deep sense of their obligations to those in need. The difference between the America of the 1830s and much of the Western Europe that he knew was, according to Tocqueville, Americans did not see the state as the first resort when it came to dealing with what would later be called “the social question.”

During his time in America, Tocqueville managed to cover the North, the mid-West, and the South. And one thing that he noticed was common to all the regions was the general absence of government. The state was not an omnipresent factor in Americans’ lives.

This, however, did not mean that the nineteenth-century Americans portrayed in Democracy in America simply left those in need to perish. Instead, they generally dealt with most social and economic problems through what Tocqueville called the habit of free association. For Tocqueville, the contrast with France, where a highly centralized state was seen as the first port of call for help, was astounding.

Tocqueville saw free associations of Americans everywhere he went in the United States:

Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France . . . in the United States you will be sure to find an association.^ix

Let us note just how many times Tocqueville references religion or religious institutions in these lines about the American habit of association. This is not a coincidence. Americans, Tocqueville noted, liked to dress up their habit of free association to help others in the language of self-interest. But Tocqueville himself could not help but see how most of the associations in America which he encountered had a religious link and, in many cases, a religious foundation. It was less significant, in his eyes, whether the association was with one of the many Protestant churches or to the then still relatively small Catholic Church in America. What mattered was religious belief and religious practice: the higher and more widespread was the habit of religious practice, the higher the degree of associational activity.

The same phenomenon was noted 120 years later by Maritain. Economically-speaking, the United States studied by Jacques Maritain in the 1940s and ʼ50s was very different to that analyzed by Tocqueville—not least because of the New Deal’s economic and social effects. Yet despite these changes and the spread of government intervention into economic and social life, Maritain observed that the habit of free association was alive and well in America.

Looking at 1950s America, Maritain commented, that one of the most striking characteristics was “the infinite swarming, on the American scene, of private groups, study clubs, associations, committees, which are designed ‘to look out for one aspect or another of the common good’ . . . . The effect is a spontaneous and steady collective regulation and prodding of the tremendous effort of the whole country, which is of invaluable importance.”^x

There was, however, something else that accompanied this associational activity which Maritain stressed. The seemingly endlessly varied web of associational activity was matched by a financial generosity that astonished Maritain:

Americans like to give. Of course, there is the exemption from taxes for gifts directed to the common welfare; but this very law about taxes would not have been possible if the astute legislator did not know that as a rule the American people are aware of the fact that it is better to give than to receive. Not only the great foundations, but the ordinary course of activity of American institutions and the innumerable American private groups show us that the ancient Greek and Roman idea of the civis praeclarus, the dedicated citizen who spends his money in the service of the common good, plays an essential part in American consciousness.^xi

Maritain went on to state that this financial generosity was another sign of just how unmaterialistic Americans were. As he put it:

There is no materialism . . . in the astonishing, countless initiatives of fraternal help which are the daily bread of the American people, or in the profound feeling of obligation toward others which exists in them, especially toward any people abroad who are in distress.^xii

Maritain then asked from where this great generosity in time and treasure came. Why was it that Americans, so consumed by hard work, busyness, and commerce, nonetheless did not forget their fellow man and especially the needs of the poor? For Maritain, much of the answer was, like Tocqueville’s answer, to be found in religion.

For Maritain, it was explicitly the call of the Christian Gospel to love one’s neighbor. This, according to Maritain, was “the deepest reason for the sense of mercy and pity, and the sense of responsibility toward all those in distress, which are rooted in the collective American psyche.”^xiii It was the commitment to the Gospel, Maritain said, “deep beneath the hardness and harshness of the hunt for material interests and advantages which is the object of ordinary activity and ordinary conversation.”^xiv

Indeed, Maritain further argued that it was the commandment to love that drove not just believers but also those Americans who were not religious or just tepidly religion to reach out to their neighbor, even if they did not talk about it. In Maritain’s words, “This spark of the Gospel lying deep in people who more often than not do not think at all of the Gospel, is not a thing that one speaks of. It is hidden in the secret life of souls, and covered by all the ordinary selfish desires and concerns of human nature. It exists, however, and is active in the great mass of the nation.”^xv And then, employing some of the philosophical terminology that was popular in the 1950s, especially in American and French intellectual circles, Maritain stated, “There is, in the most existential sense, a strain of Gospel fraternal love deep in the American blood.”^xvi

It was this, according to Maritain, which helped save America, as a decidedly middle-class country, from becoming what Maritain called “a ‘bourgeois’ nation.”^xvii I think that this is a very important insight by Maritain: one that I think is implicit to Tocqueville’s analysis, but which Maritain brings to the forefront. Put another way, Maritain believed that America shows to be a “middle class society” does not mean embracing what Maritain saw as characteristics of bourgeois society.

As those of you who are French in the audience today well-understand, the word “bourgeois” has a very specific meaning in French post-enlightenment thought. For it was, as Tocqueville stressed again and again, those who self-consciously thought of themselves as bourgeois in nineteenth century France who were most antagonistic to religion, particularly Catholicism, and who symbolized, in Tocqueville’s mind, the greed and corruption that was characteristic of King Louis-Phillipe’s self-consciously middle-class regime and middle-class dominated government. America, in Maritain’s view, showed that you could be a middle-class society and a commercial republic without all the moral flaws and spiritual emptiness which Maritain associated with bourgeois culture.

Religion and Liberty

We see then Tocqueville and Maritain sketching out a clear link between America’s commitment to economic liberty and its character as a commercial republic with a decidedly non-materialist outlook on life. We also see them establishing a strong correlation between the American habit of free association with non-materialism and a religious culture. There is, however, a third aspect of life in America upon which both Tocqueville and Maritain focused. This concerned the ways in which the world of liberty and the world of religion in America had, for the most part, avoided the conflict between the forces of freedom and the promoters of faith, especially Catholic faith, which marked much of post-Enlightenment Europe.

Though Tocqueville struggled for most of his adult life with the claims of Catholic faith, he could not help but be fascinated by how his fellow Catholics fared in the United States. Tocqueville’s France was, after all, a society in which Catholicism had long been intimately involved in politics. While the Church in France had fought many battles with the monarchy during the age of absolutism, Catholicism in late-eighteenth century France emerged as perhaps the strongest bulwark of opposition to the French Revolution and its invocation of liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Tocqueville was deeply conscious that the Catholic Church in France and other countries had endured savage persecution at the hands of France’s Revolutionaries. The Constitution civile du clergé passed by France’s National Assembly on 12 July 1790 represented an attempt to control the Church’s inner life that went far beyond anything attempted by the Bourbons. As if overnight, the Civil Constitution created a basis for mass resistance to the Revolution on the part of devout French Catholics. Catholics in France also found it hard to forgive, let alone forget, the mass killing of bishops, priests and religious by revolutionaries who professed to be promoting liberty, not to mention the thousands of Catholics slaughtered in the Vendée in what some have described as a genocidal effort in exterminate opposition to the Revolution.

Given this background, it is understandable that Tocqueville was so surprised to find that Catholic clergy and laity in America numbered among the strongest defenders of America’s commitment to religious liberty. “In France,” he wrote, “I had seen the spirits of religion and of freedom marching in opposite directions. In America I found them intimately linked together in joint reign over the same land.”^xviii

When Tocqueville asked one American Catholic priest for his opinion on whether the civil power should lend its support to religion in the sense of European-like establishment arrangements, Tocqueville was taken aback to hear the priest say:

I am profoundly convinced it is harmful. I know that the majority of Catholic priests in Europe have a contrary belief; I understand their point of view. They distrust the spirit of liberty whose first efforts have been directed against them. Having, besides, always lived under the sway of monarchical institutions which protected them, they are naturally led to regret that protection. They are therefore victims of an inevitable error. If they could live in this country, they would not be long in changing their opinions…^xix

This American Catholic commitment to non-establishment represented no concession to the idea that it was best to marginalize or exclude religion from the American public square. Catholic Americans favored the strong distinction between the temporal and spiritual realms precisely because they believed it allowed religion to exert a civilizing influence upon American society.

After hearing these views expressed by priest after priest during his time in America, Tocqueville concluded that continental Europe had something to learn from the American approach towards religious freedom. In our own time, the same claim has been made by no less than Benedict XVI.

Pope Emeritus Benedict is not uncritical of contemporary American culture.^xx Nonetheless he repeated on many occasions that one reason why America has avoided many of the disputes between Christians and non-believers that have plagued continental Europe since the various Enlightenments was the American Republic’s decision to have no established church. Interestingly Benedict also specifically invoked Tocqueville’s claim that one of the reasons that “the unstable and fragmentary system of rules on which . . . this democracy is founded” somehow managed to work was the commitment to Christian religious and moral convictions that permeated American society.^xxi

Part of the genius of America’s religious arrangements, Benedict argued, was the insight that “the State itself had to be secular precisely out of love for religion in its authenticity, which can only be lived freely.”^xxii Truth, religion and liberty were consequently reconciled in America.

When Maritain first visited the United States, he instantly noticed that Americans thought about the relationship between the state and the church in ways which were very foreign to the vast majority of European societies. Somehow America had managed to become what some have called a society in which “the voluntary establishment of religion”^xxiii prevailed.

In his time, Tocqueville thought that this state of affairs owed much to the way in which the North American colonies had been settled, especially given the number of settlers who came to North America to escape religious persecution. That included Puritans, for example, but also the Catholics from England, Scotland and Ireland who established the colony of Maryland. Almost 130 years before Thomas Jefferson drafted the Statue of Virginia for Religious Freedom in 1777, the early Maryland colony established by Lord Baltimore and other English Catholics in the 1630s was specifically committed to a high degree of religious freedom by the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649. This stated that “No person or persons . . . professing to believe in Jesus Christ, shall from henceforth be any ways troubled, molested or discountenanced for or in respect of his religion nor in the free exercise thereof.^xxiv”

Most of the early colonies were not religiously tolerant places. Indeed less than five years after it was passed, Maryland’s Toleration Act was repealed by a combination of Anglicans and Puritans: a legislative action accompanied by provisions specifically banning Catholics from publically practicing their faith, voting, or holding public office.

Perhaps it is because Maritain was primarily interested in ideas rather than in history per se, but his explanation for the happy marriage between liberty and religion in America was to describe it as an achievement of the American Revolution and the American Founding. Though Maritain recognized that the writings of the American Founders were “tinged with the philosophy of the day”—i.e., various Enlightenment thinkers—Maritain’s surveys of those same Founders and their writings led him to the following conclusion: While, he said, “[t]he Founding Fathers were neither metaphysicians nor theologians . . . their philosophy of life, and their political philosophy, their notion of natural law and of human rights, were permeated with concepts worked out by Christian reason and backed up by an unshakeable religious feeling.”^xxv

What Maritain was pointing to here was a two-fold phenomena. First, with some notable exceptions, Enlightenment thought in America had not taken on a specifically anti-Christian tone or emphasis. In North America, for example, prominent Catholics such as the Carroll family were both religiously-devout and well-read in Enlightenment thought. In their libraries, books such as Saint Francois de Sales’ Introduction to the Devout Life sat next to Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws.

This leads to the second point noted by Maritain: the American way of arranging the relationship between the temporal and spiritual realms was based on something that Maritain regarded as the essence of life: which is the search for truth. Religious liberty in America, as Maritain saw it, wasn’t about simply securing social peace and reducing conflict. Religious freedom in America was, according to Maritain, considered important because truth was important, and religious truth was the most important truth of all. That was why religious liberty was a right: it was the right to seek truth, to embrace truth, and live that truth, consistent with the freedom of others to do the same. Religious freedom, for the American Founders, wasn’t about a blessing of religious relativism. It was about protecting people as they pursed to know and live religious truth.

It’s not hard to see why Maritain would have been very receptive to this type of thinking and admiring of America for developing an emphasis on grounding religious freedom in our search for truth. For it amounts essentially to a natural law argument for religious freedom which, in 1958, he and other Catholics were seeking to develop as a way for the Church to engage the modern world without compromising the Church’s insistence that, as Dignitatis Humanae would state, the “one true religion subsists in the Catholic and Apostolic Church, to which the Lord Jesus committed the duty of spreading it abroad among all men.^xxvi” Perhaps it’s for this reason that Maritain subsequently pleaded with Americans in his book Man and the State to “not let your concept of separation veer round to the European one.”^xxvii

Criticisms and Conclusions

Tocqueville and Maritain were not blind to America’s many problems. Maritain was especially disturbed by segregation in the South.^xxviii Interestingly, he portrayed this problem as so torturous for America precisely because segregation was so contrary to the aspirations and promise of American civilization and the Christianity which had influenced it.

Tocqueville had his own criticisms of the America of the 1830s. He noted, for instance, how slavery didn’t just dehumanize the slaves; it also corrupted the masters.^xxix But Tocqueville also believed that the contrast between America’s emphasis upon liberty and the fact of slavery could not be sustained—so much so that Tocqueville thought that “great misfortunes must be expected.”^xxx This prediction turned out, like so many of Tocqueville’s other predictions, to be correct.

But perhaps the strongest criticism offered by Maritain and Tocqueville of the United States was, as Maritain put it, America suffered from “too much modesty.”^xxxi

That may seem strange to us. We’re accustomed to thinking of Americans as an immensely self-confident people—a self-confidence that can often lead to mistakes being made. But Maritain and, I think, Tocqueville had something else in mind.

According to Maritain, Americans were not very good at explaining the philosophy of America to the rest of the world. As if he was speaking directly to Americans, Maritain wrote:

You are advancing in the night, bearing torches toward which mankind would be glad to turn; but you leave them enveloped in the fog of a merely experiential approach and mere practical conceptualization, with no universal ideas to communicate.^xxxii

Tocqueville saw something similar. The very practical outlook of Americans which lead them to realize so many achievements as individuals, in association, and as a nation was sometimes an obstacle when it came to explaining to non-Americans what America was all about.

Today, 60 years after Maritain’s Reflections on America was published in New York and 183 years after the first volume of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America appeared in Paris, the United States is a very different country: politically, economically, culturally and religiously. But for all those changes, I’d suggest that many of the insights of Tocqueville and Maritain remain valid today, including but not limited to their explanations of the nature of economic life, the habit of association, and the role played by religion in America. In these and many other ways, Tocqueville and Maritain’s discoveries of America continue to help Americans to discover and understand themselves today.

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