The Washington Post's book section celebrates two visionary sons of France. Tocqueville is the subject of Hugh Brogan's "magisterial" biography - already handsomely reviewed in the UK - while Scott Berg's Grand Avenues traces the career of Pierre L'Enfant, the planner who, against all odds, created America's new capital city:
The transplanted Frenchman, who preferred the Anglicized Peter to his given name Pierre, made many more enemies than friends during his brief stay on the national stage, including local landowners and the three commissioners Washington appointed to oversee the capital's development. Nor was Thomas Jefferson a fan of L'Enfant or his plan -- he distrusted big cities and had his own, more modest ideas about what the capital should be...
Berg leads us to understand just how basic the disagreements between L'Enfant and his antagonists were. L'Enfant spoke the language of a sophisticated, visionary urban planner in the European tradition. The commissioners simply did not understand this language. Furthermore, L'Enfant knew that only public expenditure -- entailing public borrowing -- could pay for what today we'd call the plan's infrastructure, thus assuring a healthy beginning for the capital. That idea, rooted in royalist Europe, ran against the grain in the politically disputatious and sectionally divided new republic.
They really should have taken "separation of powers" more literally and sited the Supreme Court somewhere else.
Posted by: dearieme | Monday, April 02, 2007 at 02:49 PM