PERSISTENT PURITAN CRUSADERS:

"I continue to love this country.": A French friend of America repeats Tocqueville's trip (Carlin Romano, Phladelphia Inquirer)

The Atlantic Monthly, a magazine widely praised in recent years for top-notch long-form journalism, invited [Bernard-Henri Levy, France's most telegenic and controversial philosopher for more than a quarter century] last year to retrace the famous nine-month visit to America of French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville (1831-32). That trip by Tocqueville, only 26 at the time, produced the two volumes of Democracy in America (1835-40), an instant critical success at home and still considered by many the finest book ever written on America.

The bicentennial of Tocqueville's birth takes place on July 29. And the first of Levy's seven articles, offering his experiences and insights, appears in the magazine's May issue. A Random House book based on the articles is promised for early 2006.

"On the whole," Levy remarks, asked how his year of exploring the United States affected him, "I did not change. I remain the same anti anti-American. I continue to love this country. I even love it more."

A metaphor comes to mind.

"It is like with women," says the longhaired lightning rod envied by many countrymen not just for (a) his fame, (b) his sparkling career, and (c) the 150-million-euro fortune that resulted when he sold his father's timber company, but for (d) a legendary love life now focused on his marriage to Arielle Dombasle, the beautiful French actress.

"It is a crazy idea," Levy continues, "to imagine that when you know a woman better, you love her less. When you know her better, in ordinary life, she is even more moving than seen from afar."

Tocqueville's visit here ostensibly began as an investigation into America's penal system. Democracy in America nonetheless became, historian Daniel Boorstin wrote, "the standard source for generalizing about America."

Tocqueville brought a brilliant overview to American society, putting U.S. politics into perspective while astutely commenting on the worldwide move toward social equality and the growing significance of "individualism," a word that first entered English through the translation of Democracy in America.

Like Tocqueville, Levy came ashore at Newport, R.I. He went on to visit, among other places, New York's Rikers Island prison, a mega-church in Barrington, Ill., and Minnesota's Mall of America, mirroring if not exactly re-creating Tocqueville's travels.

Judging from the first installment, Levy reverses Tocqueville's priorities, placing raw reportage first, overarching generalizations second. He talks to the well-known, such as novelist Jim Harrison and American Indian activist Russell Means, as well as to such ordinary Americans as the Illinois cop who catches Levy relieving himself on the side of a highway.

The peripatetic Frenchman is "struck by the omnipresence of 'The Star-Spangled Banner,' " impressed by our "extraordinary sense of the law," convinced that America isn't all "backward cowboys and uneducated people."

In fact, Levy says, he rejects the cliche of America as an unphilosophical country: "If you mean ideological country... I would even say the reverse. The ideological debate might be stronger today in America than in France."

That, he suggests, is one change from Tocqueville's America. Others, Levy notes quickly, include a surprising growth of puritanism on the American left, and the rise of America's "democratic messianism."

Had Tocqueville visited Revolutionary or Civil War America instead of antebellum he'd have seen all the same things.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 7, 2005 12:00 AM