READ For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus by Frederick Brown download book free fb2

Book description

Book description
Karen Armstrong is a silly person who writes books about religion. She also appears to be a kindly soul, in a tea-and-crumpets sort of way, but she’s still, I repeat, a silly person. In a recent Salon interview, she bemoaned the atheistic impertinencies of Bill Maher and Sam Harris, comparing the two men to Nazis for their criticism of Islam. ‘It fills me with despair,’ she said. ‘This is the sort of talk that led to the concentration camps.’Now, you don’t have to be a fan of either Maher or Harris to see how insane that is. Never mind that a supposedly respectable writer has so airily breached Godwin’s Law. Never mind that both men in question—a Hollywood liberal and a neuroscientist—are Jewish. And never mind that, unlike real Nazis, they’re not inciting violence or threatening anyone. The question here is simple: are we allowed to mock and criticize religious dogma, or are we not? Are we allowed to say things like ‘Islam [or Wicca or Scientology] is the mother lode of bad ideas,’ or are we not? Armstrong’s answer is a curt no. And if you do, you’re obviously a Nazi.Armstrong’s potshot represents an inconsequential skirmish in the culture wars, but it shows how imperfectly the whole Enlightenment thing has been assimilated by certain minds. If even a writer as sweetly reasonable as Armstrong claims to be can say such things, it means we’ve still got a ways to go before we beat down the old infâme. It’s still out there, snarling and slavering and pulling at its chain. It’s enough to fill you with despair, or some less melodramatic emotion.But what the hell does any of this have to do with a book about 19th-century France? Quite a bit, actually. Many of our ideological squabbles today, like the one described above, are faint and distant echoes of a much nastier brawl that roiled French society from about 1870 onwards. Reading For the Soul of France, you see some familiar conflicts being rehearsed—left versus right, secularism versus religion and so on—but with way more drama, bomb-throwing and duels. Although the political groupings were shifting and complex, Frederick Brown maps out the frontline thus: on one side, you had liberals and socialists fighting for a democratic and above all secular republic; on the other side, you had a lot of reactionary assholes. (That’s a bit simplistic, obviously. To be more precise, the reactionary assholes included Catholics, royalists, and blood-and-soil nutjobs with a collective hard-on for Joan of Arc. Plus, of course, there were the inevitable drooling anti-Semites, but they didn’t make up a group so much as trail their slime over all the other ones – including those on the left.)Summarized in this way, the book sounds like a bedtime story for liberals, with a Whiggish moral about the ultimate triumph of progressive ideas. And in fact, the narrative ends with the exoneration of Dreyfus and the official separation of church and state, lending a certain credibility to this reading. But as we know, history’s not that tidy. The crazed nationalists and Jew-haters never went away; they bided their time, churned out their pamphlets, and gradually swelled the muddy little tributaries that fed fascism, finally getting their revenge in 1940. But that’s another story – and one that Brown himself has recently told in a sequel. And in case you’re feeling all Whiggish and bien pensant yourself, you should know that the French left also went completely insane for a few decades – but that’s another story too, and I can only hope Brown is busy working on it. The blood feud that is French political history cries out for a trilogy, at the very least.
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