596
PARTISAN REVIEW
nation, but also the strongest, the healthiest, and the best if we honestly
weigh all of the physical and moral aspects." And in this vision, the Jewish
capitalist, detached from the cult of the soil, stands out as the anti-peasant.
Thomas Jefferson, a devout Francophile, had also stressed the impor–
tance of agriculture and the virtues of those who work the land.
In
his
Notes on Virginia
he even wrote that "those who labor the earth are the
chosen people of God, if he ever had a chosen people." Farmers were the
"chosen people," however, not because they cultivated the land, but be–
cause they cultivated republican virtue. Jefferson admired their indepen–
dence which he deemed the most important protection against political
despotism: "Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the
germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition....
It
is
the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor."
Whereas Jefferson's aim was always the preservation of an independent
republican state, Michelet associated the cultivation of the land with spiri–
tual transcendence rather than with political health and survival.
Michelet explicitly excluded the Jew from the Christ-like French na–
tion and from the profound and quasi-sexual bonding that he imagined
between the peasant and the soil: "The shepherd wanders on the surface
of the land; he is the faithless lover. The farmer is the husband; he tears
off her green belt and plants the double seed of grain and sweat. The
permanent union of man and woman sooner or later produces another
marriage, that of man and land." One of the popular scenarios in novels
of the day was the capitalist's victimization of the peasant: the banker,
whose predatory reach extends from the city to the country, expropriates
the peasant's land, destroying his independence, strength, and will to live.
Michelet sounded the alarm: "If the peasant becomes the serf of the
usurer, he will not only be miserable, but will lose heart. And what kind
of race would rise in such conditions, terrorized by the Jews?"
The economic underpinnings of this anti-Semitic mythology lay in
the abyss separating land value from money value in France. Money and
other forms of transportable wealth were disparaged in a country in which
property,
real
estate, had always been associated with privilege and status.
In
1790, Edmund Burke had commented on the dichotomy in France
between land and money, pointing out that landed and moneyed interests
were far more separate and less miscible than in England, where the two
interests together formed a dynamic combination that promoted eco–
nOI111C progress.
For his part, Tocqueville confirmed and expanded upon Burke's
comments.
In
France, Tocqueville reminds us, the nobility, traditionally
prohibited from entering commerce and industry, associated power and
prestige with ownership of the land. For the members of this land-owning
