The Philosopher Alain and French Classical Radicalism

Abstract

and the wars of Napoleon I requires no other empirical confirmation than a casual examination of French political history since 1789 will afford. The life of any nation is sustained by its symbols; the French deprived themselves of theirs the moment they escorted King Louis XVI to the guillotine. As symbols of a national consensus, the Marseillaise, the tricolor, and Bastille Day have proved to be quite inadequate substitutes for the Fleur-de-lis and the majesty and pageantry of a royal dynasty, themselves found wanting earlier. For in their political temperament the French have remained both monarchical and republican (radical), never being really certain which of these poses best depicts their true self. The malaise of that republic in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is perhaps most accurately diagnosed in terms of the psychological effects of periodic oscillations between those two states of mind, with no viable synthesis or midpoint compromise ever attained. The French are reputedly the world's supreme individualists, who dislike the restraint of being governed much more decisively than they lack the knowledge of how to govern. Astonishing it therefore is that nowhere in the English literature that concerns France is there available a full exposition of the political thought of the one man who since the eighteenth century has most vividly exhibited the French political spirit or, more specifically, the spirit of French classical radicalism' during the Third Republic. That man is the philosopher Alain, pseudonym for Emile-Auguste Chartier, who lived from 1868 to 1951.2 Now, it is true that Alain is frequently cited and quoted