The Aesthetics of Reaction: Tradition, Faith, Identity, and the Visual Arts in France, 1900–1914 by Neil McWilliam

Neil McWilliam’s The Aesthetics of Reaction is a thorough overview and analysis of a vein of conservative cultural discourse in France during the period beginning around the fin de siècle and continuing to the outbreak of World War I. The motivations behind this discourse were multiple: “writings on visual art, and on culture more generally, are understood as integral to conservative and nationalist groups’ elaboration of theories of tradition, to their understanding of the specific character of France as it had developed over time, to their evaluation of contemporary culture as a barometer of national vitality, and to the remedies they promote for collective regeneration” (9). That is to say, writing on art (and culture) helped conservatives understand what they wanted to preserve, how bad modernity had proven to be for it, and how to address the damage modernity had done. Clearly, the work of sifting this collection of writings and writers, parsing its many and conflicting claims, and organizing it all into a coherent exposition is the work of years, if not decades, of immersion in French cultural history. It will surely serve the discipline for a long time.

McWilliam considers three major areas of interest to the reactionaries—nationalism, tradition, and religion (specifically Catholicism)—and develops in a series of chapters their treatment of one of these areas after another. The most prominent among the many groups that appear in the survey is Action Française and its chief theorist, Charles Maurras. But the cast of characters is large, if unfamiliar to most of us, and the points of view represented vary considerably. Even the staunchest believers waver in their convictions. (Maurras veers away from Catholicism, for instance.)

The first part of McWilliam’s book, “Scenes and Doctrines,” comprises three chapters that deal with the task of defining the French national art and culture of the period under consideration. The first chapter, “Ideologies of Nationhood in the Early Third Republic,” begins by noting that the very “idea of a national identity, underwritten by the legacy of previous generations and acted out through the instinctive habits, linguistic usages, sympathies, prejudices, and assumptions of daily life, though widely accepted as ‘common sense,’ is cogently questioned by social theorists” (17). Seeing post-Revolutionary France as cut off from its grand tradition and overcome by intellectual trends such as Kantianism and positivism, right-wing figures embraced the Roman Catholic Church’s turn to neo-Thomism, or else they turned to Catholic mysticism. Or they turned to a conservative reading of Nietzsche for an aristocratic ideal. Or they embraced classicism (28–29). Note the variety of available responses and the lack of harmony or common foundation among them.

The second chapter, “Conflicting Traditions: Dealing with the Past in Republican France,” addresses the conservatives’ reliance on the idea of tradition. A major schism within this domain of right-wing thinking turned on a distinction between the Gothic, medieval France and the school of thought that celebrated the introduction of Italian masters at Fontainebleau by Francis I. This latter tendency is adjacent to the issue of classicism, which departs, McWilliam notes (citing Allan Pasco), from an admiration for antiquity over the course of the nineteenth century “to mean ‘disciplined, restrained, ordered, true and logical’” (43–44).‍[1] This notion of classicism often falls into association with admiration for Poussin and the “Grand Siècle.” The poet Louis Mandin, writing in 1913, proposes that France’s way forward lay in a synthesis of the northern and southern roots of its culture (46–47).

Chapter 3, “Making French Art: Defining a National Culture before 1914,” focuses on the predicament that faced those concerned about the French tradition in pictorial art between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of World War I. Jacques-Louis David; the ministry of arts under Antonin Proust and the end of the government-underwritten Salon; the rise of Impressionism; the diversity of pictorial experiment among contemporary artists; and the loss of skill in traditional craft and technique are all contenders for traditionalists seeking to explain the state of French painting. French parochialism and a colonialist regime of cultural appropriation vied to give purpose and coherence to a notion of “French art” that seemed in disarray.

The second part of the book, “Religion,” is two chapters: the first—chapter 4, “Picturing Spirituality: Tradition, Beauty, and Faith in the Catholic Revival”—reviews approaches to a question formulated by Louis Dimier in 1911 that McWilliam paraphrases: “did art’s religious nature necessarily reside in subject matter and stylistic affinity, or was a sacred function fulfilled through the representation of plastic beauty as an end in itself” (69).‍[2] Should religious (Catholic) art depict scenes from the life of Jesus and other sacred persons? Should the scenes be historical or should they assist the viewer in contemplating the presence of the divine in our modern world? Should the subjects be natural, so that divinity is implied? Should the painter strive for verisimilitude or imitate the style of Fra Angelico? Or should the painter embrace the discipline represented by the High Renaissance? For Dimier, the discipline introduced into tradition by the High Renaissance offers a model for the artist seeking to suppress individuality and pursue instead the beauty essentially possible in art (90). For the neo-Thomists abbot Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges and the Dominican professor Ambroise Montagne, even a still life could be a work of devotional art. McWilliam quotes Sertillanges: “In the brushstroke of Chardin, I see not only an object, I see the idea of object . . . in this trifle a perspective on the Whole opens up; in this essence of object, the omnipresent immensity exults in itself and I find it there.” (93, McWilliam’s omission).‍[3]

The next chapter, “Catholic Tastes: Religiosity, Aesthetics, and Tradition in the Art of Maurice Denis,” deals with Denis as he sought to create a genuinely Christian art of his own. Denis, McWilliam explains,

exemplifies the ambitions and frustrations of the Catholic revival examined in the previous chapter. His apparently wayward trajectory as an apostate from the Symbolist avant-garde of the 1890s is best understood as being shaped less by a commitment to formal innovation as an end in its own right than by a search for formal procedures judged adequate for art’s spiritual mission as an expression of faith. (99)

In 1888, Denis discovered the nude as a possibility for spiritual devotion. The next year, he recorded in his diaries a renewed abject devotion to Fra Angelico (99–100). In 1890, he worked in an anti-naturalist cloissonisme supported by his studies in positivism (100). At that time, he disdained verisimilitude and saw Paul Gauguin’s work as an avatar of the true Christian tradition (103). “Denis’s pictorial practice during the early 1890s,” however, “is far more varied and contradictory than [his] self-assured tone would lead one to expect” (107). (McWilliam doesn’t mention it, I believe, but Denis even experimented with pointillism, first in 1889–91 and again later in his career.) Denis did use the anti-naturalistic means of Symbolism to express a sense of the devotional possibilities of, say, landscape; but he also resorted to allegory and to stylistic affinities “with Italian masters such as Fra Angelico or Domenico Ghirlandaio” (109). By the middle of the decade, Denis describes a natural formal harmony underlying the work of artists from “ancient Egypt through to the era of Cimabue” (110). He worked at that time with a group from the abbey of Beuron—Christian artists informed by the teachings of Desiderius Lenz, the founder of the Beuron school, whose Zur Ästhetik der Beuroner Schule (1865) was later translated by Paul Sérusier and published with a preface by Denis in 1905. Lenz, according to McWilliam, was an important source of ideas about pre-Renaissance art and its formal expressiveness (110).

In 1898, Denis visited Rome. There, after some discussions with André Gide, he underwent conversion to the artists of the High Renaissance and to the classical spirit behind them, who “address our judgment more than our senses” (113).‍[4] In writings from the painter’s third visit to Italy, in 1904, he begins with attacks on the Primitives but, within a short space of time, begins to love the quattrocento all over again. After his return to Paris, he wrote “De la gaucherie des Primitifs” (“On the Awkwardness of the Primitives”), in which he “denigrates ‘Greco-Latin art’ as all too often ‘cold and charmless’” (119).‍[5]

In contemporary art, Denis admired (for his ability) but deplored (for his abstraction and reductivism) Henri Matisse, whom he opposed to Aristide Maillol, an artist descended from “Ingres, Puvis, Manet, Renoir, and Degas” as well as Paul Cézanne (122). Then in 1912, with some influence from Dimier, Denis abandoned the idea that the forms and spirituality of the Egyptians and Primitives were inherently Christian (125). Instead, he embraced a Thomist/Aristotelian devotion to the specificity of the natural world as against the inner world and idealism of the High Renaissance. In 1914, however, he “[turned] his back on Aquinas’s naturalism” (126). By 1919, he had returned to his devotion to Fra Angelico. Again he was using plastic equivalents to express subjectivity, but this was no longer an untrammeled subjectivity; rather, it was one subjected to the discipline of “truth” (127). This led to a different kind of Thomist approach that was neither style nor subject matter that guided the artist to a right relation with the world to be represented. The Christian artist, on account of the artist’s beliefs, created a Christian art, regardless of subject matter or style.

If I have dwelled a little excessively on Denis, it is because this chapter makes vividly a point that I hope my summaries of the first four chapters made in less detail. The theorizing of the reactionaries is various, (self-)contradictory, and partial to the point of emptiness. In the three chapters devoted to notable individual cultural producers: Maurice Denis, Joaquim Gasquet, and Émile Bernard, following the thread of their wavering theories seems evidently productive. As an art historian, I can see in these theoretical wanderings the tides that move the artists’ works in what would otherwise seem puzzling directions. But here, somewhat understandably, it is the vacillation itself that we discover. The art, not so much.

In a sixth chapter, “Action Française: The Experience of Centuries,” McWilliam opens the third part of the book, “Royalism,” with an examination of theorizing in the Action Française group. The key figures in this are Charles Maurras and Louis Dimier. The ideas of Maurras and their affinity with his royalist position depend on his love of a certain aesthetic—a classicism he associated with the French monarchy—and contain what should now seem like a routine portion of self-contradiction. He abhorred German culture, yet depended quietly on the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, for instance (149). His enthusiasm for Greek culture during an assignment to report on the first Olympic games celebrated the human body with a passion that verged on Romanticism, which he despised (153). Poussin embodies “Frenchness” in painting, despite having studied with a Flemish master and having discovered his Frenchness in Rome (159). Similarly, it is Francesco Primaticcio and the Italian immigrants lured by Francis I who, for Dimier as well as Maurras, woke France from its Gothic slumber (167–68).

But there is ultimately a sense within Action Française’s art theory:

In promoting the goal of synthesis, Maurras and his followers conceive of an aesthetic that reconciles divisions they regard as inherent to the art of the nineteenth century, and as symptomatic of the period’s broader socio-political dysfunction. In royalist terms, synthesis overcomes the divide between Realism and Romanticism/Symbolism (the Real and the Ideal) by transcending the distinction between object and subject that subtended much of the aesthetic theory of the previous century. This was achieved, in theoretical terms, thanks to the rationalist postulates of Maurrassian thought. . . . A painting is deemed a rationally ordered equivalent to nature and, as such, neither a “real” (objective) representation of a scene nor an idealized (subjective) distillation of it, but rather a fusion of both. (178–79)

Thus, for Dimier, Impressionism yielded too much to instinct; Symbolism (Gustave Moreau, in particular) placed eclecticism and formula above tradition. On his account, Ingres is bad (181–82). (For Denis, he had been good.) Ultimately,

Maurras’s dogmatism provoked impatience and dissent across a broad field, forcing figures such as Dimier and Lasserre out of the movement, and encouraging young royalists to make overtures toward syndicalism and the philosopher Georges Sorel. Dimier’s memoirs reveal frustration with Maurras’s immobilism: his constant vituperations against the Republic and calls for violent action against its leadership, Dimier suggests, were matched by a bookish aloofness that trapped his rhetoric in a vacuum of inertia and indecision. (188)

The youth, as contemporary writers surveying the moment wrote, rejected his authoritarianism and abstraction from “moral realities” (188–89).‍[6]

McWilliam begins part 4, “Renaissances,” with another chapter on the historical context: chapter 8, “Modernizing Tradition: Towards a New French Renaissance.” This chapter discusses several figures who are relatively more familiar: Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, and Ricciardo Canudo, among others. Its topic—the notion of cultural renaissance—continues the debate about the true nature of French culture. Jacques Reboul and Robert Pelletier (and his Ligue Celtique Française) represent Celtic nationalisms. Armand Fourreau, a critic and art historian deeply devoted to the Celtic tradition, saw Francis I’s importation of the Italian Renaissance as a defilement of the original French culture. Like so many others, he took up Jean Siméon Chardin as an important precedent for modern artists and embraced Paul Cézanne:

Cézanne and his antecedents practiced “ideorealism”—an aesthetic equilibrium that Fourreau argued characterized the achievement of the French Gothic tradition. Seeing it as a perfect balance between body and soul, Fourreau describes “the Gothic genius” in 1910 as “that balance, that moderation, that harmony, which they knew how to maintain between the two artistic poles of reality and the ideal, as they did between the two sources of inspiration in feeling and reason, which underwrite the character of eternal beauty in their work and make of Gothic art the classical art of the Occident.” (257)‍[7]

Sound familiar? It should by now.

In fact, I will forego summaries of the remainder of that chapter and of the two others that feature single figures, those on Gasquet and Bernard. For Bernard, we might say the task is to find or forge a synthesis of the painter’s sensuous experience of the world with the desire for a spiritual, even divine truth. This search involves questions of social organization, such as the need for a certain kind of aristocracy to permit those who have attained the synthesis to exert authority. The relation of that aristocracy of beauty to the more conventional idea of aristocracy as a temporal power remains a little unclear, but he has an illiberal social organization of some kind in mind. For Gasquet, the classical, pagan beauty of Mediterranean civilization became a rallying call against Christianity, but not unambiguously. A version of Christ from Virgil’s fourth Eclogue motivated Gasquet to appreciate Christian art and even organize its production. Again, the desire is to impose some kind of willed artistic form on natural life. And again, a kind of aristocracy (in this case of a Nietzschean variety) is the answer. For all three of the featured artists, Paul Cézanne remained a privileged, if not always simply positive, example. There is a kind of center that counterbalances the contradictions.

The thematic chapters, in which terms such as nationalism or tradition reveal their problematic elusiveness, demonstrate the contradictions and shifts in the reactionaries’ discourse so forcefully that the concepts and the writings in which they are developed seem nearly empty. Of course, in one sense, it is McWilliam’s aim to show that the terms on which conservative cultural politics turn are unable to bear the burden they are called upon to bear. This is an important point, and one might easily wish McWilliam had made it more central to his exposition. One problem that follows from this is that McWilliam never exactly defines conservatism or reaction—unless you count the whole book as a kind of extensional definition of conservatism during the period in question. Another problem is that he never really gets into the matter of what cultural conservatism is (or was) supposed to accomplish.

Here’s what I mean: in his opening pages, McWilliam identifies an echo of his subject in a modern-day controversy. He quotes Emmanuel Macron, during his 2017 campaign for the presidency of France: “There is no such thing as . . . French culture, there is a culture in France, which is diverse, and multiple” (5, McWilliam’s omission). This pronouncement, which Macron enlarged upon by explaining that France’s greatness had always involved absorbing resources from without, drew criticism from conservative politicians such as Yves Jégo and François Fillon as well as from the philosopher Bérénice Levet. In response to Macron, McWilliam tells us, Levet offered a genealogy of great French painting. Oddly, Levet’s roster of painters supported Macron’s point by including foreigners like Pablo Picasso, Nicolas de Staël, and Balthus, who had immigrated to France to join its tradition, or, to use Levet’s term, the “French style,” which constitutes “a unity and continuity, a sort of thread that one can follow” (5).‍[8] So, Levet’s claim ends up being less about French painters than about the attraction for painters within France and beyond its borders of painting in a tradition that goes back at least as far as Nicolas Fouquet and that flowered in France from the seventeenth through mid-twentieth centuries. Her argument, that is to say, is about French culture. Meanwhile, she accuses Macron of “multiculturalism.” Multiculturalism, or the belief that what you should do is determined by who you are, and that who you are is determined by who your parents are (i.e., by your background/ethnicity/race), would directly challenge the idea that a French culture—which is French by virtue of its continuity with France’s past—should occupy a privileged (i.e., exceptional) status. Levet acknowledges that non-French people gravitated to Paris during its heyday to join in the French cultural project, which is to say she accepts that assimilation is possible and even desirable for the good of the culture. Assimilation is a more complicated topic for multiculturalism—a core value of multiculturalism is the preservation of difference (and specifically, difference among cultural, which is to say ethnic, groups). What both share, though, is a commitment to the idea of culture—that who one is exerts some legitimate normative authority over what one does, where who one is is determined by one’s ethnicity or race.

Levet’s argument holds that Macron’s multiculturalism is of a piece with his declaration that France must be “in step with the world,” which is in turn the slogan of his “economic ultraliberalism,” the “uberization of all sectors of activity” (l’ubérisation de tous les secteurs d’activité), meaning “flexibility, precarity, instability” (la flexibilité, la précarité, l’instibilité). As others—very notably Adolph Reed Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels—have argued, Levet is right that a multiculturalism/antiracism like Macron’s is deeply compatible with neoliberalism (which I take to be the more generally accepted term for l’ubérisation) insofar as it replaces questions about inequality as such with questions about historical (dis)advantages and disparities of outcomes among members of different ascriptive categories and with the celebration of difference more generally.‍[9] Indeed, multiculturalism provides a kind of political and rhetorical cover for neoliberalism.

If Levet’s diagnosis is right, though, her prescription is quackery. Cultural chauvinism won’t end neoliberalism. So why do we talk about the two—about the issues of “culture” and the instrumentalization of liberalism by capitalism—as if they were related? This is a great mystery that lies just beneath the surface of the theorizing McWilliam reviews. A traditional culture rooted in the greatness of France, we are repeatedly told by the figures he studies, will produce a well-ordered society, a renaissance, cultural vitality, and vice versa. The mechanisms ensuring the twined fates of French culture and society are obscure or glib in the writings McWilliam quotes, just as they are in Levet’s polemic.

I suppose the reasons are deep in the nature of conservatism and, in a certain way, in liberal capitalism. Just like neoliberalism, capitalism has always appealed to cultural politics for cover. Writing in the late 1930s, the historian and philosopher R. G. Collingwood analyzed the situation:

Between these two “classes” in modern European society, the Socialists held that there was in existence a “class war,” and that parliamentary institutions only disguised this war and did not overcome it. The democratic tradition maintained that parliamentary institutions acted in such a way as to dissipate any tendency to class war by means of free speech and open discussion. Fascism on this point agreed with Socialism; though its mouthpieces, pursuing their declared policy of deceit, denied it. But whereas Socialism hoped to end the class war by a workers’ victory leading to the abolition of class distinctions, Fascism hoped to perpetuate it by a capitalist victory leading to the permanent subjection of the workers.‍[10]

The socialists could address the class war frankly; fascists had to lie about it. Collingwood initially hoped that liberalism, understood as the democratic tradition, could end the class war by reconciling the opposing interests of workers and capitalists in open debate. Those who work for the capitalists’ enduring victory cannot openly advocate for their cause. You cannot win the public to your cause if your cause is their permanent subjection. Thus, they are “not capable of honesty”; rather, they are “muddle-headed” (158).

Most disturbingly, Collingwood goes on to recount how the democratic and parliamentary government of his own Britain participated in egregious deceptions throughout the interwar period because the discursive apparatus of democracy (i.e., the press) was subverted, and the interests of the ruling class were better aligned with fascism than they were with socialism. In other words, cultural discourse—even that of liberal democracy—serves material interests, and the faction of the class war that dissembles its interests will use public discourse to advance its deceptions. Conservatism is necessarily “muddle-headed” and capitalist societies are readily dominated by conservative forces because capitalists control so much of the means of public discourse.

I propose this little piece of high-altitude analysis as a sort of makeshift diagnosis of the problem McWilliam is illustrating so fully. Conservative cultural criticism isn’t confused because it is inadequate; it is confused because that’s what it’s for. It replaces attention to the way the world works with sentimental attraction to fantasies of identity and belonging and lost greatness. The perennial quality of this function does not escape McWilliam’s text, historically rigorous as it is. In his conclusion, McWilliam returns to the idea of a “resurgence of illiberalism,” which, while historically distinct from the topic of his own study, leaves

lessons to be learnt and parallels to be drawn, though with due regard to changing circumstances, intellectual as well as material. In both [discourses], the brash assertion of cultural particularity—of a definable collective “identity”—is haunted by an ineradicable sense of this identity’s feebleness. (325)

The “French style” is always, apparently, under threat from hostile and alien forces, but there also remains an obdurate difficulty in saying exactly what the true France and its rightful tradition are—northern or southern, Gothic or Baroque, and so on. One benefit of considering this history now is that we face similar challenges (e.g., the “resurgence of illiberalism”) from a culturally conservative reaction.

Another benefit for us now of considering the cultural conservatism of the moment McWilliam studies, he explains, is that “modernism itself looks today much more complex and contradictory than suggested by the heroic narratives until recently emblazoned on the walls of New York’s MoMA or the Pompidou in Paris, and modernity as an era of progress and democracy more ambivalent in its promises, partial in its achievements, and precarious in its gains” (325). That is to say, the reactionaries were unhappy with modernism because they abhorred its progressive promise, its rejection of tradition, and its rootlessness, but liberals have their own reasons to be unhappy with modernism, as McWilliam implies, because it hid a complexity and contradiction that gave the lie to the heroic story.

Of course, one might object that the pluralistic aftermath of modernism more closely resembles and embodies the truest, as well as the best and worst, features of liberalism, and that modernism itself was never about producing a kind of cultural correlate of democracy. From the point of the class war, too, the period following modernism’s downfall has been much worse than its heyday.‍[11] But for the purposes of McWilliam’s revisionism, adding the lost conservative voices of McWilliam’s narrative back to the story is crucial (along with the broader survey being written on MoMA’s new walls) to redressing modernism’s exclusions.

And so the question turns out to be, is what the reactionaries contribute valuable as opposed to merely muddle-headed? McWilliam doesn’t exactly say. One infers that he sees the vacillations of Bernard, Denis, and Gasquet as part of a single fabric, along with the work of Cézanne and Gauguin so that, seeing the fabric whole, we can see that it is more generally “complex and contradictory” than we have been telling ourselves. Certainly, Cézanne and Gauguin were capable of faltering and self-contradiction in their progress. But the mediocrity of some of—say, Bernard’s—theoretical and pictorial work doesn’t impugn the astounding achievements of Cézanne and Gauguin, does it? Aren’t the really impressive parts of the heroic story still impressive? Further, by taking the reactionaries’ empty ideas seriously, don’t we risk distracting ourselves from what is important in just the way conservative cultural politics is meant to distract us?

These questions are serious. But we study cultural production, so ultimately the question is whether we study the work and discourse we care about or whether we study all of it, so as to see the past more fully. It’s not really that we didn’t know the cultural landscape between the 1890s and World War I was larger than the heroic achievements of modernism. It’s that we wanted to know and understand the parts of it we valued and were taught to value most. But we knew all this about revisionism. What I find especially interesting and useful for our own moment, though, is the way the discourse McWilliam exposes to our view takes up precisely that topic: the topic of values and how we come to establish and share them. Multiculturalism, traditionalism, and modernism are ways to answer this challenge.

So when, to take one of many instances cited from many authors, Bernard says “Democracy has leveled souls and buried them beneath Opinion,” he voices his regret that modernity has made everyone’s opinion equally important (321). Likewise, Denis celebrates classicism because it subordinates the individual’s sensation to tradition and authority (114). (As we have seen, he is hardly alone in this.) Romanticism, democracy, individuality all serve throughout the book as proxies for the individual and the threat the individual poses to authority. But if what the liberals of our own moment dislike about modernism—the heroic variety—is precisely that it didn’t deliver this democratic vision, were the reactionaries worried about the wrong thing? I don’t think so. The reactionaries wanted a cultural politics—that is, they wanted art that was about the unity and specificity of the French tradition. Today’s illiberal reaction wants the same thing. In fact, today’s multiculturalist liberalism wants a cultural politics, too. It just wants one that celebrates the multiplicity and variety of Frenchness. They are all opposed to modernism because it offers too little in the way of cultural politics. When Édouard Manet turned to the tradition of painting, it was not to celebrate French exceptionalism or to resist it, but to work through the history of the art, to reappropriate its origins. (McWilliam evades Michael Fried’s account of Manet’s relation to the history of painting in a footnote, referring to Manet’s relation to “Watteau, Chardin and Le Nain” as “supposed” [34n20].‍[12]) If reaction—via Maurras or via Levet—demands the affirmation of identity, and multiculturalism—whether it’s the neoliberal Macron or MoMA—they both reject modernism because it doesn’t.

Who cares? Let’s return to the issues I raised at the beginning. What is conservatism or reaction in McWilliam’s view? Throughout, he shows us a kind of yearning for tradition and for nation and for religion, paired with a suspicion of liberalism, of individualism, and of progressivism. The yearning is vague and self-contradictory, as are the tradition, the nation, and the religion. The yearning is ideological in the sense of being a mystification, a way of blinding oneself to the truth. To the extent that conservatism has a coherence, is it not in the function Collingwood saw? In the effort to obscure the basic fact of class—the opposition between those “whose energies are focused on owning things” and those “whose energies are focused on doing things”?‍[13] And more specifically to hide class behind the idea of culture—the idea that certain traditions, nations, and so forth are right for certain people because of who they are. This, it seems to me, is the half of the project McWilliam very ably describes. It is also the project both Macron’s multiculturalism and Levet’s chauvinism advance, in their own ways. It is also alive and well in the United States today.