France celebrated Bastille Day on Saturday. Like its sister republic on this side of the Atlantic, the French Republic marked its liberation from the yoke of monarchical rule.
But despite the shower of fireworks, parades and speeches in praise of liberty, don't be deceived. Liberté isn't quite the same as liberty, especially in the 21st century.
We have long known that France is, well, a foreign country. Take the bidet — which most Americans do, as a cooler for Coke, not a spritz for their private parts.
Even more peculiar is the ascenseur à cornichons, or cornichon elevator, the green mesh platform with which one raises those glistening and petite pickles to the jar's lip. The elevator is as graceful for the French as it is meaningless for Americans. What's wrong with a fork?
Johnny Hallyday, the 69-year-old megastar whose concerts still fill French soccer stadiums, is no less foreign for Americans: a bit of a surprise, since he launched his career half a century ago as France's answer to Elvis.
To our eyes, the bidet is little more than plumbing out of place; the cornichon elevator is ingenuity out of place; and Hallyday, quite simply, is Elvis out of place. Once placed in the proper cultural frame, however, they cast a light on the complex society that gave them life.
Like the English colonists, French revolutionaries were rebelling against monarchical despotism. The rubble-strewn space they left where the Bastille prison once stood reflected this newfound sense of “negative” liberty: It was freedom from. From arbitrary rule, from invasive institutions, from hereditary privilege, from being thrown into the Bastille on the whim of a nobleman.
But, as it turned out, the French also wanted freedom from material insecurity, want and illness. During the revolution there also surged a “positive” understanding of liberty. The French became free to. To work with others, to commit to a greater good, to sacrifice their individual desires in order to achieve something bigger and better.
Our own country straddles the same tension between the negative and positive charges of liberty: The pursuit of happiness, after all, proclaims certain positive rights (and later, the Constitution's “promote the general welfare” added to the chorus).
But now more than ever in the United States, the negative gloss seems to have trumped the positive. The noisiest among us only want freedom from — taxes, a health-care system, a California bullet train. They've forgotten the importance of freedom to. For this reason, just as cornichons are botched pickles, liberté may seem like liberty trampled. But once resituated in its proper frame — one brimming with state-subsidized day-care centers and doctor visits, four-week paid vacations and the 200 mph TGV — liberté fully assumes its meaning.
It's their mix of freedom from and to that explains how the French can be the most individualistic of peoples, yet remain committed to a state that seeks to guarantee the well-being of all its citizens.
Americans will probably differ on whether cornichons are good to eat, but as French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss remarked about such things, they are “good to think.” Let's reflect on whether the same holds true for the notion of liberté: at the very least, it is good to think about pickles, plumbing, pop stars and life in the land of the free, à la française.
Robert Zaretsky teaches French history at the University of Houston and is co-author of “France and its Empire Since 1870.”
