Anti-Tocqueville: Baron de Mandat-Grancey

France

Given the popularity of “French Regrets,” I will share another excerpt about French ruminations on their failure to act at the decisive moment in the War Between the States:

“Past acquaintances with the United States had given Frédéric Gaillardet a head start, but his anti-American venture would not be a solo one for long. Ten years later there would a great editorial rush toward America, the Uncle Sam rush. For the moment, Gaillardet had to make do with the unexpected Edmond de Mandat-Grancey as a traveling companion.

A distant cousin of Tocqueville, whose ideas he boasted of not sharing, the Baron de Mandat-Grancey was an ultraconservative. A serene racist and confirmed antidemocrat (he predicted the rapid demise of New York, an inevitable result of “the spirit of heedlessness which is inherent in democratic governments”), he seemed more interested in the enhancement of the equine race than in the workings of America’s social and political institutions. Spry and instructive, he peppered his travel diaries with remarks that gave off the whiff of high society. Thus he disapprovingly noted that in New York one saw “very few private carriages” and that “those one does see are ill-harnessed, ill-kept, and driven by coachmen with unspeakable mustaches.” Elsewhere, he waxed indignant over “the incommensurable culinary ignorance” of Chicago’s 600,000 inhabitants, who had never prepared crayfish à la bordelaise, despite the fact that ” all the streams in the vicinity are literally crawling with the admirable crustaceans.” It would take all the irascible baron’s aplomb to articulate such grievances with solemn gravity and use them to flesh out the docket in his case against the United States. …

These authors’ treatment of the “black question” was both more brutal and circuitous. Mandat-Grancey’s racism was not paved with a single good intention. He did not mince words, declaring the black race “absolutely inferior to the white race.” Abolitionism was an abomination to the baron, who had not forgiven Victor Hugo (and this in 1885, when France gave Hugo a state funeral) for having “spilled so many tears over the misfortunes of John Brown and all the Dombrowskis and Crapulskis of the Commune.” It speaks volumes about Mandat-Grancey’s intellectual universe that he would associate Communards with unpronounceable names with the famous abolitionist hanged in 1859 in Charlestown for having roused the blacks to insurrection. But this fundamental racism, loudly and clearly expressed, did not stop the very same Mandat-Grancey from placing the entire responsibility for the unworkable and explosive situation created by the “black question” on the hated Yankee’s shoulders. Without the North’s hypocritical propaganda, the blacks would have stayed in their place. It was the Yankees who had opened Pandora’s box, and in this sense, they were more hateful than the former slaves misled by their promises. How could you blame the Southerners for taking a few steps toward self-defense – such as creating the Ku Klux Klan – in reaction to the unbearable “state of things”? And how could you avoid fantasizing (aloud) about the Yankees’ annihilation by the very people they had purported to want to free at any price? “If this continues,” Mandat-Grancey glibly prophesized, “the Yankees, who struggled so hard to free the blacks, will be conquered by them like the Tartars were by the Chinese, or else they will have to suppress universal suffrage.”

After substituting the Indians for the cowboys, why not replace the Yankees with the blacks? At least the choice he was offering America’s Anglo-Saxons had the merit of being clear-cut. They could choose between their own demise or the destruction of their founding institutions, starting with the tradition of “one man, one vote.” The blacks would practically find favor (a very temporary one) in Mandat-Grancey’s eyes. Immanent justice that they should be ones to inflict punishment on the self-same Yankees who had, in more than one sense of the word, unleashed them. Frédéric Gaillardet had been satisfied with a less apocalyptic historical irony in stressing the fact that the freed blacks had used their right to vote in favor of their former masters. But for both writers, there was the same dialectic, in which the Yankees were presented both as the exterminators of the non-Anglo Saxon races and the sorcerer’s apprentices of a false and calamitous emancipation. …

Their views about the Civil War’s being a missed opportunity were also identical. Mandat-Grancey’s sympathies are less unexpected than Gaillardet’s: how could a conservative aristocrat not be on the Confederates’ side? Like Gaillardet, then, he reshuffled the diplomatic cards; he recast and replayed France’s had with big swipes of “we should have” and “we would only have had to.” For “we would only have had to unequivocally back [the Confederates] to make America permanently split into two rival States which would have mutually paralyzed each other, and of which one, made up of populations with preponderantly French roots, would have been a precious ally for us.” Self-interest and honor worked together here: “Having started the war in Mexico, ti was the only way of getting out of it honorably.” So it was the same old story? No! France’s spinelessness was what had allowed a devouring monster to come to life – “the reconstructed United States.” It had now “achieved the economic conquest of Mexico by constructing its network of railroads, and soon it will take over the Isthmus of Panama in order to profit from the millions we are so madly spending there.” But Mandat-Grancey was a better prophet in announcing France’s misfortunes than in wishing them on the United States. The Panama Canal would be taken over in the end, as he had predicted, but the secession of the American West, which he considered just as inevitable, would not take place. In Mandat-Grancey’s opinion, France had played its cards so badly during the 1865 conflict that it would only have been sporting of America to give it a second chance with an encore of the Civil War – but his wish would remain unspoken …”

The Baron de Mandat-Grancey, who would have certainly taken the side of Western civilization if he were with us today, is another forgotten voice who predicted the rise of BRA in the United States. As we saw in Black Summer 2010, those were prophetic words about what the Black Undertow unleashed in Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia.

Note: After watching this video and the gazillions of others like it that involve the Black Undertow on WorldStarHipHop, it might be worth doing a review here of George Fitzhugh’s pioneering work, Sociology For the South: Or The Failure of Free Society.

With the benefit of 150 years of hindsight, Haitian independence, and Black in America 4: Silicon Valley, it might be worth revisiting the wisdom of abolition. Prohibition was revisited. Can the African negro survive and prosper in a free society? Prepare yourself to find out on The Day The EBT Card Stops Working.

Maybe the Yankees ought to take the lead and reenslave the negro starting with Eric “My People” Holder, Al Sharpton, and Jesse Jackson and put them to work rebuilding civilization in the Northern states.