AS I WAS SAYING
The triumph of bourgeois complacency
PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE
Nowadays I seem to spend my working life — regrettably a diminishing slice of my real life — desperately searching for some burning political issue (apart from fox- hunting) to get hot under the collar about, or for a subject about which it is possible seriously to disagree. Dare I mention, in the same breath, that this was also Toc- queville's experience as a member of the French Assembly during the last ten years of the reign of King Louis Philippe.
Here is his explanation:
As all business was discussed among the members of one class, in the interests and spirit of that class, there was no battleground for contending parties to meet upon. The sin- gular homogeneity of position, of interests, and consequently of views deprived parlia- mentary debate of all genuine passion ... In the political world thus constituted and con- ducted what was wanted most ... was politi- cal life itself ... The whole country grew accustomed to look upon debate in the Chamber as domestic quarrels between mem- bers of a family trying to trick one another. A few glaring instances of corruption led people to pre-suppose a number of hidden cases, and convinced them that the whole governing class was corrupt; when it conceived for the latter a silent contempt which was generally taken for contented submission.
As it happened, I came upon this quota- tion by chance. Looking along the shelves of the London Library for a biography of Tolstoy, my eye was caught by a volume entitled Recollections of Alexis de Toc- queville which I had never read and did not know existed. Would a search for Tolstoy on the computer also produce such an unexpected prize? Not being able to work a computer, I would like to think not. In any case I forgot about Tolstoy and took out Tocqueville's Recollections. Wow, what a read! It is a quite unputdownable insider's account of the 1848 French Revolution which deposed Louis Philippe, and also of the few months spent by Tocqueville as for- eign secretary in a subsequent short-lived republican administration under President Louis Napoleon — before he had turned himself into an emperor.
The single class Tocqueville was referring to, of course, was the bourgeoisie. By van- quishing the aristocracy and priesthood, and by executing one king and constitutionalis- ing his successor, France had handed power, in effect, over to the bourgeoisie. But because the bourgeoisie was not a dis-
tinct and specific body, but rather an amor- phous mass spreading up into the lower aristocracy and also down into the better-off peasants, it was almost impossible to tackle. Hence the languor of the people who no longer had identifiable enemies to pursue. Enrichissez-vous was the order of the day. It was not an oppressive or violent rule; nor even, by the standards of the 19th century, one that bore down with any unusual severi- ty on the poor. Rather the opposite. The poor were also getting richer. In spite of this, or even, as Tocqueville believed, because of it, parliamentary life was lifeless, dull, small-minded, 'more like an insurance company looking after the interests of the shareholders' than a government 'firing the aspirations of great nation'.
Soon enough, of course, as Tocqueville goes on to say, socialism, by threatening private property, put adrenalin back into the body politic. But the period Tocqueville describes so revealingly was in the interval between the end of the monarchical-aristo- cratic era and the dawn of the socialist era, during which the whole of French politics was circumscribed by what was not so much bourgeois triumphalism as bourgeois com- placency.
Is that not pretty well an exact replica of what is happening today here at home, except that in our case it is the death of socialism rather than its failure yet to be born which accounts for the lack of faith or ardour in our political life? For, contrary to Mr Blair's anti-establishment rodomon- tade, the teeth of the old order have been effectively drawn — the operation has been slow but relatively painless — and the British bourgeoisie, thanks to the good offices of capitalism, have spread upwards to the very social peaks and downwards to all but the very lowest depths, to a degree where Tocqueville's words about all busi- ness being discussed 'among the members of one class, in the interests and spirit of that class' and about there being 'no battle- ground for contending parties to meet upon', apply even more stultifyingly here and now than ever they did there and then. And far from the current debate over Europe disproving this conclusion, it clinchingly confirms it.
For the debate about Europe is the very model of a bourgeois debate: between those who think Britain — i.e. the bour- geoisie — would be better off materially
inside the euro and a federal Europe and those who think they would be better off outside. If Eurosceptics deny this and insist that the debate is all about national sovereignty, freedom and independence, why don't they commit Britain to an anti- European stance, however damaging the economic consequences might be? Why doesn't Mr Hague take his stand on free- dom and independence at any cost? We all know why. Because any such heroic and self-sacrificial stand would be indignantly repudiated by all the parties. In other words, even the Eurosceptics are all for preserving Britain's independence but only so long as it can be achieved without putting taxes up. What could be more bour- geois than that?
How differently the issue of Europe was debated during the last years of Britain's ancien regime before the bourgeoisie entirely ruled the roost. The Old Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell flatly opposed going into Europe because it would mean, he said, 'the end of a thousand years of English history', and the Old Tory leader Harold Macmillan supported entry on the statesmanlike grounds that it was Britain's duty to enter in order 'to help heal the wounds of Europe'. Is it even imaginable that the parties would use such rhetoric now? The Daily Telegraph might, since even the bourgeoisie like to reach for the stars — but only on condition that practical politicians, at least, keep their feet on the ground.
The same, of course, goes for domestic politics. Both parties nowadays promise to spend more on the poor, but only when the country can afford it. Of course that makes good bourgeois common sense, just as it makes good bourgeois common sense to suck up to Chinese despots. Pakistan is another matter. Nothing to gain from that quarter. Again the newspapers might indeed do — carry leading articles deplor- ing such cynicism, and their readers feel good for having read them; but newspaper comments on politics and real politics bear about the same relationship to each other as does Romantic poetry to plodding prose.
To decide to fight Europe would be a great risk. It wouldn't be a matter, so to speak, of dropping bombs safely from an invulnerable altitude. No, in this battle there might well be cripplingly high casualties on the economic front, lots of body-bags. Rest assured, the bourgeoisie won't dare.
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