French Politics, Culture & Society

La préparation institutionnelle de l’élection L’élection de 2002—la septième élection présidentielle française au suffrage universel sous la Ve République—a donné lieu à une préparation institutionnelle sans précédent depuis la première, celle de 1965, qui s’est concrétisée par la réforme du quinquennat et l’inversion du calendrier électoral. La réduction du mandat du président de la République de sept à cinq ans (le quinquennat) était un projet de longue date dans la vie politique française, que le Président Georges Pompidou avait déjà tenté de mettre en oeuvre en 1973. Cette réforme a été impulsée par le Premier ministre Lionel Jospin, suite à une proposition de loi déposée à l’Assemblée nationale par l’ancien Président Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Le Président Jacques Chirac, qui s’était d’abord déclaré hostile, s’est ensuite rallié à cette proposition en la faisant soumettre à référendum le 24 septembre 2000.

France has become a worldwide champion of antiglobalization. France is home to José Bové—sheepfarmer turned McDonalds’ wrecker and, in the process, world famous antiglobalization activist. France is also home to ATTAC, a vocal organization originally designed to promote the so-called “Tobin tax” on financial transactions, but which has since become a powerful antiglobalization lobby present in over 30 countries. France is a country where intellectuals have long denounced the cultural and economic shortcomings of US-led globalization, and where newspapers and other media outlets have endlessly documented how France was threatened by foreign entertainment, customs and values. In short, criticizing globalization “sells” in France. French politicians have understood and embraced this trend. On the Left as on the Right, for the past few years, political figures have loaded their speeches with rhetoric critical of a phenomenon that gets a lot less attention in other European countries and in the United States.

In 1949, French officials at the Chicago consulate issued an urgent memo to Henri Bonnet, the French ambassador, about the consequences of new French and American programs aimed at promoting transatlantic tourism. Americans, the consul warned, “think that France, and particularly Paris, is becoming the playground of America.”1 Paris, the consul continued, was perceived essentially as a tourist space, a place “where the citizens of the United States can free themselves of all constraints.” He wondered how the American public would ever be able to understand the “difficulties of life faced by the mass of the French population.”

Pierre Dumas had high hopes for the 1965 tourist season. At the very least, the French state secretary for tourism hoped to avoid the frustrations of the previous year, when the US and French press, and even French senators, accused the French of being rude to foreign guests. As warmer weather returned in April, Dumas traveled to the new Orly Airport outside Paris to launch his response. He greeted foreigners, mostly Americans, as they disembarked for stays in France. Young women dressed in the white gloves and modern pink dresses of official Hôtesses de France stood beside him, handing out free roses and perfume bottles. Dumas himself distributed booklets of “smile checks” (chèques-sourire), which the government had printed for its new “National Campaign for Reception and Friendliness.” When tourists felt they received particularly good service in a hotel, restaurant, or elsewhere, they were to tear out one of their ten smile checks, inscribe the name and institution of the friendly employee, and then mail it, no postage required, to the government’s tourist office. At the end of the season, the government would award the ten most-honored French workers with vacation trips of their own to Tahiti, the Antilles or New York City.

We might begin with a few comparative remarks about sex and politics in France and the US. Americans were treated in 1998 to a deliciously painful set of events that precipitated a full-scale constitutional crisis in the US and some rethinking of the relations of the public and private spheres. Despite what seemed to many French observers as a more or less unproblematic White House sex scandal, it was denied by American commentators left and right that Monicagate had anything at all to do with sex. It’s not about sex, said Clinton’s Republican accusers, it’s about lying under oath and the rule of law. It’s not about sex, said his Democrat defenders, it’s about his political enemies seizing any opportunity they can to undo two consecutive elections. Nor was the affair about sex for the principal actors: for Kenneth Starr, presidential sex was just a convenient way to set a legal trap for a slippery guy he couldn’t nail any other way; for Linda Tripp, it was the royal road to personal revenge; for Monica Lewinsky it was a chance to consort with a powerful man. It wasn’t even sex, as we have heard many times, for Bill Clinton himself, but something that never rose to the level of what New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd called “lying-down adult sex.” Even Hustler publisher and cinema free-speech hero Larry Flynt, whom no one would accuse of being dismissive of sexuality, treated sex in this whole matter as an opportunity to expose the hypocrisy of his political enemies.

Robert Nye’s elegant essay rightly puts the PaCS, and the debates about it, into a historical context of French natalism. At least since the late nineteenth century, reproduction has been the raison d’être of the married couple and the state has often made fertility synonymous with patriotism. From this has followed all manner of representations, many of them contradictory. Thus although it surely was the case, as Nye shows, that marriage was eroticized and marital love idealized, it was also the case that reproduction and sexual satisfaction were considered separate domains. French bourgeois culture, however idealized its family, has long been associated with the inevitability of extramarital affairs. One of the reasons French commentators found the Monica Lewinsky scandal ridiculous and symptomatic of what they define as American puritanism, was that it contrasted so sharply with their own customs and expectations. Mitterrand’s second family was hardly shocking from that perspective; and judging by films, novels and statistical findings, the desire of men and women can rarely be satisfied within the confines of marriage. Indeed one of the aims of the PaCS was to resolve the tension between laws based on a sentimental view of the family and social practices that had given the lie to these views. The abolition of the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children is an example of this; it recognizes that marriage is no longer enduring and that family arrangements have eroded the grounds on which “legitimacy” was once conferred.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century Democracy in America (1835-1840) reverberates through US political culture with more vibrancy than at any time since its original appearance.1 Newspapers and news magazines have abundantly applied Tocqueville’s observations to our latest election crisis. As soon as it was published this new volume’s editor was immediately rewarded with an appearance on National Public Radio. Beyond its additional testimony to a culture hero’s iconic status, what does the prodigious effort involved in producing a new translation add to the fund of Tocqueville scholarship? This is the first version to appear in thirty-five years and the third since 1945.2 The editors’ aim was to make theirs the most literal of all renderings. Only in deference to 165 years of tradition did they exclude the French particle from their title (i.e. On, or Concerning, Democracy in America). The translators are implacably true to their word. This version even replicates the original French word order as closely as possible. A more quotable Tocqueville is consciously sacrificed in the name of accuracy, but the reader can be assured that this is as close to the original as we are likely to get. Very rarely, such devotion to fidelity produces jarring history. We learn, for example, that Virginia’s success as a settlement was assured by the timely arrival of “farmers and industrialists”; industriels is more aptly translated as mechanics or artisans (31).

In the course of preparing a new translation of Democracy in America (to be published by the Library of America), I have had occasion to look closely at the recent translation by the distinguished political scientists Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. The volume begins with a brilliant introductory essay that has to count among the best brief accounts of Tocqueville’s work.1 Mansfield and Winthrop then vigorously defend a particular view of translation. Their intent, they say, is to be “as literal and consistent as we can, while still readable.” They also seek to be “modest, cautious, and faithful.”2 They are critical of the work of their predecessors Henry Reeve and George Lawrence on the grounds that these “literary persons,” not being students of the text in the sense that “philosophers” are students of texts, “presume to know the meaning of the author. That, they believe, is no more difficult to acquire than by looking in a dictionary, or by experience not needing to look in a dictionary. … Neither translator had in mind the need to study the book.”3

The French journal, Raisons politiques, devoted its February 2001 issue to “Le Moment Tocquevillien.” What is but a moment for France has lasted for more than a century and a half in the United States. Here, admiration of Tocqueville, always great, has now reached the point where readers will soon have to decide among three entirely new translations of Democracy in America: this one by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop,1 James Schleifer’s, for the Liberty Fund, and Arthur Goldhammer’s for the Library of America. How should their audience go about choosing among them?

In considering the complex relationship between author and translator, Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop observe with insight that all translators of texts—we might add readers of texts—are ultimately unable to ignore what they think they know.1 Inevitably my response to their work is shaped by what I think I know about Tocqueville—and like Professors Richter and Drescher—what I think I know about his context and intended audience. Although Mansfield and Winthrop’s hope is to remove the translator as much as possible from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and to give us his text in pristine form with philosophical subtleties intact, they too give us a translation that is marked by presupposition and a desire to harmonize the whole. After a brief consideration of their “literal” translation strategy, I want to turn to one particular example of how the Tocqueville of this new translation speaks to us in a voice inflected by what his translators think they know.

Seymour Drescher is a fine economic and social historian and Tocqueville scholar; Arthur Goldhammer is among the best translators of French working today; Melvin Richter is a distinguished scholar of the history of European political thought; Cheryl Welch is a judicious analyst of French political thought. We are grateful to them for the generous spirit in which they have called to our attention some errors and difficulties in our translation of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America—and, of course, chagrined that they should have been there to find. Some of the corrections are of careless errors, for which there is no excuse. Others are of confusions caused either by our occasional failure to supply a noun to replace a pronoun whose referent is clear in French, but unclear in English, or by our inconsistent translation of the French indefinite pronoun on. These, too, we should have caught. Still other criticisms identify different choices they would have made. We respect each sort of criticism. But the corrections do not dispose of the issue of what principles should be brought to bear in translating.

Sheldon S. Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

Jennifer Pitts De Tocqueville by Cheryl B. Welch

William Poulin-Deltour French Resistance: The French-American Culture Wars by Jean-Philippe Mathy

Marion Fourcade-Gourinchas Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology: Repertoires of Evaluation in France and the United States Edited by Michèle Lamont and Laurent Thévenot

Notes on contributors

Index to Volume 20 (2002)