by Ian Buruma
Hence, it was decided he should be a priest. The Jesuits of the Collège St-Ignace could be counted on to banish sinful thoughts, such as republicanism or socialism, from the minds of their charges. Even as republican politicians were setting up a secular state education system, Coubertin was raised as though the ancien régime had never disappeared. St-Ignace, whose gray daytime uniform was modeled after that of Eton, was an expensive little island of reaction in a nation that had seen, in the space of a decade, a Bonapartist empire, a radical rebellion, and a new Republic.
Such violent upheavals, thought Coubertin, were too much even for a people as great as the French to bear. He described the French of his youth as “a people dissatisfied with themselves. The government that dissatisfied the monarchists was not good enough for the republicans. And a feeling of national impotence to produce anything stable weighed on everything.” What was needed, in his view, was a moral revival, preferably through education. The old aristocracy, marginalized and distrusted by the republican bourgeoisie, was no longer able to inspire the patrie. A new elite was called for. A new set of notables should show the way and “rebronze” the nation. Naturally, Coubertin would be one of those notables. He wanted to play an aristocratic role in a bourgeois world, be a true amateur among professionals, or, in sporting terms, a Gentleman among Players. Before saving France, however, he first had to deal with his own sense of impotence. He had to rebronze himself.
Coubertin certainly had no desire to be a priest. As his odd behavior at Dr. Arnold’s tomb suggests, he was not without religious feeling. But it tended to be expressed in a liking for vaguely Hellenistic rituals or exalted jamborees of universal brotherhood, with torchlight parades and hymn singing. The life of salons, Jockey Club, card games, and mistresses in the corps de ballet was not for him either. He did not want to be imprisoned, as he put it, “in the ruins of a dead past.”
Women didn’t interest him much anyway, even though he did marry one in the end. He preferred horses and bicycles and working up a sweat on the fencing court. His erotic feelings were deflected perhaps into sudden cultish enthusiasms—for nudism (“air-bathing”) or taking baths in “virile perfumes.”
Although he had literary ambitions, to be dashed again and again, Coubertin was no intellectual. His prose had the overblown quality of an after-dinner speech. Since he was to spend much of his life giving after-dinner speeches, this wasn’t a disadvantage. But he wanted to be a man of action as well as a public figure of substance. The civil service was not an option, he didn’t want to be a diplomat, and business was out of the question. This left the army, the one national institution that still welcomed patriotic aristocrats. So Coubertin followed his brother, Albert, into the St-Cyr military academy. But even the army was no longer what it used to be. Bureaucratic efficiency took precedence now over chivalry. Professionalism was the thing, not the cut and dash of noble prowess. So he got bored and left before graduation.
Coubertin was not the only young Frenchman of his time with thoughts of lifting the nation from its decadent state. France in the 1870s and 1880s was a bit like the Weimar Republic: you could, if you had sufficient funds, be a flâneur, forget about politics, and indulge in more or less elegant dissipation; or you could dream of revolution, if you were a man of the Left, or revenge, if you belonged to the Right. Even to be a flâneur could be a political gesture, as it had been earlier in the century. Baudelaire was a generation older than Coubertin, but his dandyism—the fastidious black suits, black cravats, and black shirts—and cultivated aloofness were ways to forge a new, spiritual aristocracy of artists and intellectuals, standing out against the banality of the bourgeois age. Not for nothing was Baudelaire given the nickname His Eminence Monsigneur Brummell. Baudelaire was neither an aristocrat nor an Anglophile, but he admired the airs of an ancien régime in Britain. “Dandies,” he wrote, “are becoming rarer and rarer in our country, whereas amongst our neighbours in England the social system and the constitution (the true constitution, I mean; the constitution which expresses itself through behaviour) will for a long time yet allow a place for the descendants of Sheridan, Brummell, and Byron …”
Coubertin would not have had much in common with Baudelaire, let alone Brummell, but he shared their discomfort with the bourgeois age. He felt socially dislocated, or as he often put it déclassé. His enemies were not the Jockey Club dandies, however, but the right-wing revanchists and left-wing radicals. Both Left and Right were united in their extremism: either the people should rule absolutely, or the king; nothing short of these would do. Coubertin’s allies and mentors were the liberals, that is to say the conservatives, who were forever fending off men with too much zeal on all sides. They wanted power to be shared, which is why many admired the British constitutional monarchy, governed by a parliament of gentlemen and nobles.
Charles Maurras, five years younger than Coubertin, and a far more influential thinker, was a typical man of the Right. He loathed Germany but loathed Britain even more. Not an aristocrat, but from a respectable Provençal family, Maurras had one thing in common with Coubertin: he, too, wanted to create a new elite, or as he put it, “a new knighthood in service of Beauty and the Good” (Chevalerie nouvelle au service du Beau et du Bien), And he shared Coubertin’s enthusiasm for ancient Greece. In the event, Maurras’s knighthood turned out to be L’Action Française, that sinister band of right-wing extremists that he helped to found in 1899 in response to the Dreyfus Affair—he was of course a ferocious anti-Dreyfusard. Far from being chivalrous, the Action Française was often violent, always revolutionary, and, during World War II, supported the Vichy regime.
Maurras was not only an Anglophobe, he hated Jews, liberals, republicans, Freemasons, Protestants, and Americans too. Normally, thinkers with such extreme and bitter views are not noted for subtlety or wit, or a graceful prose style. Maurras was blessed with all these things. He blamed Anglomania for the decadence of France. The French, he said, were once the Greeks of Christendom. France under the governance of kings and the Catholic church had been the flower of civilization, a social order of classical logic and beauty. This had been fatally undermined by the deluded admiration of British institutions by Voltaire, Montesquieu, and others, who had been corrupted by Jewish chicanery, Freemasonry, and mendacious British propaganda. The virus of Anglo-Saxon liberalism had rotted the classical order of France like a cancer, causing the catastrophic revolution of 1789. Perfidious Albion, meanwhile, royalist, aristocratic, and happy in its splendid isolation, continued to reap its reward from the debasement of France.
As one might expect, Maurras was never keen to visit Britain. He came to London only once, to see the Greek antiquities in the British Museum. He deplored everything he saw: the sooty streets, the rude crowds, the vulgarity of English taste, the deplorable food, the barbaric language, and the rapacity that had forced him to come to London to inspect the Greek treasures in the first place. But he held his nose, marched through the museum, paused at the marble Athlete of Polycetus, and exclaimed: “Which malign god or unhappy meeting of destinies brought this youth of our blood to these grey and humid skies?”
Maurras actually supported Coubertin’s early efforts to rebronze France. But although Coubertin was a classicist too, his vision of the reincarnation of Greece was not France of Louis XIV but England of Thomas Arnold or, more precisely, of Tom Brown’s School Days. To Maurras this Anglophilia made Coubertin into a detested liberal, and it didn’t take him long to turn against the great sportsman. However, like so many Anglophiles, Coubertin was a nostalgic liberal who longed for a regime of enlightened nobility. In a sense, then, both Maurras and Coubertin were men of the Right (Coubertin refused to come out in favor of Dreyfus; he dithered on the fence). The difference was that while Coubertin was a conservative, Maurras was a revolutionary. Maurras was an enemy of the Enlightenment, while Coubertin’s Anglophilia was still in the tradition of Voltaire.
COUBERTIN’S ENTHUSIASM FOR Tom Brown was unusual for a Frenchman of
his time, or indeed of any time, but not unique. His most important guide in this brand of Anglophilia was Hippolyte Taine, the psychologist, art historian, and critic whose Notes on England is a classic of Anglophile literature. Coubertin had read Tom Brown’s School Days already at school, in 1875, in J. Girardin’s translation. But it was Taine’s book that made him read it again, this time with far closer attention.
Taine was not always an Anglophile, nor was his Anglophilia without reservations. The son of a lawyer in the Ardennes, Taine was a brilliant, methodical scholar whose industry and erudition (and perhaps his stocky build) gave him the reputation of having a “Germanic” mind. He was known to his schoolmates at the Lycée Bourbon in Paris as “the great wood-cutter.” In his twenties, Taine was attracted to German idealism: Hegel, Herder, etc. He grew out of that, however, and turned to more practical English ideas instead. Always a patriot, he cut off relations with Germans after 1871. But the violence of the Paris Commune made French radicals seem just as abhorrent to him, perhaps more so. He was in Oxford when the violence broke out, giving a series of lectures on Corneille and Racine to a largely female audience. He read about the “outrages” in the British papers and despaired for his country.
Britain seemed so stable and civilized compared to France. He wrote to his mother that the British not only obeyed majority decisions without plotting coups d’état, but that the minority was free to say and print whatever it wanted. Taine was invited for dinner by Benjamin Jowett, master of Balliol. He admired Jowett’s collection of prints by Rembrandt and Dürer. The flowers arranged by the bay windows he thought very fine. And the dinner-table conversation—Taine speaking in French, the others in English—was of the highest quality. Jowett and his English guests, including the duke of Bedford, worried that Britain might face uprisings too. But it was a lucky thing, so Taine was told, “that our roughs aren’t philosophers like yours, who take up theories as their banner, and guns in their hands.”
Taine typified the French liberal conservative. He had hated the authoritarian, even prisonlike regime of his lycée, where a child was never able to act freely but was instead treated like “a horse between the shafts of a cart.” This, he said, bred contempt for authority and unwholesome thoughts. Quite how those thoughts were expressed is not clear from his account, but like Coubertin, Taine was much preoccupied by the fevered fantasy life of adolescents. He rebelled against the Catholic church, whose endless services he found tiresome even as a child. (So, for that matter, did Maurras, who was anything but devout, but he believed in the Church as an authoritarian institution.) If Taine was attracted by any church at all, it was the Anglican church, with its easygoing attitude to religious doctrine. Like other Frenchmen escaping the dogmatic regime of Rome, he tended to exaggerate the tolerance of Anglicans. A word with Dr. Arnold, or indeed the young Gladstone, would have revealed a Maurrasian zeal for building a theological state.
Taine was in favor of individual liberty. But he was also obsessive about order. He loathed left-wing revolutionaries as much as Bonapartist adventurism. His scathing portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte in his book Les Origines de la France contemporaine (1890) showed exactly where he stood toward the French Revolution: he hated it. Nor was he a convinced democrat. He believed in the principle, which he often invoked, always in English, of “self-government.” Yet nothing, in his view, was more stupid than giving everyone the right to vote; it would be like making every common sailor captain of the ship. Self-government meant government by an upper class of enlightened and wealthy men, who could act for the common good. And that was precisely what he thought the English had, and the French did not.
The French might have more cultural finesse, and certainly had better food and drink, but Taine could think of no better political system than the British one. The British were free, as well as law-abiding, unlike the French, who, like the boys at his old lycée, were oppressed and prone to violent anarchy. Britain was liberal, but not very democratic, just the way Taine, and indeed most nineteenth-century Anglophiles, liked it. This idea of England was actually rather similar to Voltaire’s and Montesquieu’s, except that what had been radical in the eighteenth century had become conservative a hundred years on. But unlike Voltaire, Taine didn’t believe in rationalism. He found the notion that a state could be based on reason alone absurd. That, after all, was why the French Revolution had resulted in so much terror. He believed that Britain’s unique balance of liberty and order was the result of its climate, its racial makeup, and its history.
Taine was a firm believer in national character. As usual with this line of thinking, he used the terminology of nature. Far from endorsing the idea of Voltaire’s coconuts, Taine argued that the results of imitating British institutions abroad had been “grotesque”—except in the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries. It could not be otherwise, he said, because a nation’s constitution is an organic phenomenon, just like that of a living body. You might be able to mimic its appearance but could never assimilate its substance. Laws, charters, and institutions are determined by ancient habits, which are “like a complex of deep and branching invisible roots.” The stability of British government was “the fine flower at the extremity of an infinite number of living fibres firmly planted in the soil of the entire country.” No wonder Taine, in this frame of mind, was irritated by any sign of cultural inauthenticity. The classical architecture of Edinburgh, for example, offended him. He thought the Greek columns on Carlton Hill looked absurd in the swirling mist: “The very climate seems to revolt against shapes proper to a dry, hot country; and the needs, tastes and ways of northern men are even more hostile to them.”
Taine’s project was not to imitate British institutions but to make a systematic study of the national character that determined them. His method was bookish as well as empirical. He would start with works of the imagination and then confirm his literary impressions by using his own eyes, traveling on trains, striking up conversations, visiting churches and schools, and so on. He did this conscientiously, despite his limited ability in English. And it really was limited: once he was served buttered toast, when he had ordered potatoes.
The sum of Taine’s conclusions was drawn up in his magisterial History of English Literature, which appeared before Notes on England. He argued that the French spirit was Greek in origin, formed by an ideal of beauty and truth. Here, if in very little else, he was in agreement with Maurras. The British, Nordic, Protestant spirit, on the other hand, was Hebraic. As one could see from the dress sense of the average Londoner, or indeed the mediocrity of British painting, the Hebraic spirit had little use for beauty. Its strength was respect for the law, individual liberty, and good conduct. The greatest thing, in Taine’s opinion, about English Protestantism, indeed the core of la grande idée anglaise was “the persuasion that man was above all a free and moral person.” Because the free and moral man makes up his own rules of behavior before God, he must apply them to others, but above all to himself, through self-restraint. This restraint was particularly necessary in Britain, for Britons, in Taine’s view, had gross, even bestial appetites, which required strong measures to keep in check. Think of their greediness for red meat, their drunken boorishness, and the degradation of their sexual habits. A puritanical conscience is the least one would need to offset these Nordic excesses.
Taine’s British trips in the 1860s were short, and he does not seem to have plunged too deeply into what he called the “muck-befouled hind quarters” of British society. He noted the drunks at Hyde Park Corner, “reeling about and being sick,” the paupers in rags along the Strand, and the whores in Haymarket. He visited “a kind of lust-casino” in Soho, called the Argyll Rooms, and found that the “spectacle of debauchery in this country leaves one with an impression of nothing but degradation and misery. Nothing brilliant, bold and smart, as in France.” And this was actually a rather high-class establishment. But for the “human head and the splendid torso” of English society, he had nothing but praise. It
was represented by the kind of voluntary associations that Orwell would later celebrate: the gentle civil society of stamp collecters, cricketers, and pigeon fanciers. Except that in Taine’s case, the admired associations were mostly upper-class; like most Anglophiles, he was a snob. The best of Britain was civilized, moral, free, and restrained, the very qualities, in short, of the ideal English gentleman.
As Tocqueville had done before him, Taine drew a distinction between the gentleman and the gentilhomme. The latter is a more meretricious creature, noted for his elegance, finesse, and exquisite style. The gentleman is distinguished by his character, sense of duty, and integrity. There is no word for “gentleman” in French, because, in Taine’s opinion, there was no such thing in France. Dr. Arnold, on holiday in France, had come to the same conclusion. The English gentleman, he sniffed, “is a finer specimen of human nature than any other country, I believe, could furnish.” Again like Tocqueville, Taine believed the reason lay in the nature of the British upper class, which was flexible, open to money and talent, always ready to recruit new members, whereas the French nobility had made itself useless by being exclusive, reactionary, and privileged without feeling any responsibility for the common good. French aristocrats, he said, lived on only as “a tolerated memorial of the past,” whereas English gentlemen were indispensable to Taine’s recipe for good government. Unlike authoritarian administrators, these good and noble men inspired natural deference. In their safe hands, government would naturally be based on consent.
