The second difference has lain in the ideological field surrounding the party. Initially outgunned in voters and members by Marchais, Mitterrand famously outmanoeuvred the PCF, reducing it first to impotence, and eventually to near-extinction. But to do so, he had to avoid moving too openly into a more capitalist universe of political discourse. For though French Communism was visibly shrinking, down to the end of his first tenure it continued to weigh in the force-field of national memory and ideology. Even after 1989, as events were soon to show, popular insurgencies drawing inspiration from the country’s revolutionary traditions could not be altogether discounted. So however neo-liberal the policies of his regime, Mitterrand was careful not to cross the line of political decorum that required the PS be more—or other—than a mere local version of social democracy. His successors, possessed of less authority in the party and more evidence of continuing radical attachments in the population, have hesitated to come out of the ideological closet ever since, even as they have drifted steadily further to the right.
The result has been to accentuate the acrimony of personal rivalries without political differences, in a structure paralyzed by its inability to close the gap between its pretensions and its practices. In this stasis has gathered a deepening sink of corruption, as successive notables have been caught with their hand in a till of one kind or another—Dumas, Strauss-Kahn, Dray, Kouchner, all naturally unscathed by the law, with no doubt more to come. With Sarkozy, finally, have come desertions, and with them demoralization. Currently riven between two equally tarnished mediocrities, Aubry and Royal, with many another predator waiting in the wings, the PS is a party without any stable principles or identity.72 After years of looking wistfully, if furtively, at Blairism in Britain, it has missed that bus, gone to the wreckingyard in its country of origin. Like the former Communists in Italy, many of its leaders now hope to skip the awkward staging-post of social democracy, long shunned, for a direct route to social liberalism. There is no sign the public is impressed. Effectively, the party is adrift, relying on its inherited status as the default alternative to Centre-Right rule, whenever that should falter, sans plus.
That this might not be enough, even in the event of a steep drop in support for Sarkozy, is already becoming conceivable. To the left of the PS, the forces that led popular opposition to victory over the European Constitution in 2005 did not fare well in its aftermath. Far from capitalizing on this spectacular success, they dispersed and lost momentum, unable to agree on any common programme of action, or electoral lists. ATTAC, key to the organization of much of the battle against the EU charter, divided into antagonistic camps soon afterwards, and went into decline. Le Monde diplomatique, weakened by both the failure of the long teachers’ strike of 2003, demoralizing one of its traditional readerships, and tensions over the perennial apple of republican discord, the issue of the veil, lost a third of its circulation. In April 2007, the combined tally of all candidates of the far Left dropped 40 per cent below its level in 2002, while total voter turnout rose 10 per cent. The press could hardly contain its satisfaction. At Le Monde Colombani congratulated his fellow-citizens for flocking to the polls and sensibly dividing their votes between the two leading candidates, each impressive in their way, in an exemplary display of civic responsibility.
The idyll did not last long. Within a month Colombani had been unceremoniously ousted by journalists at Le Monde, which had been steadily losing money, followed in due course, with still less dignity, by Minc—both men promptly enlisted for counsel by Sarkozy. Plenel had been dropped overboard well before. This turmoil, reflecting the economic crisis of the mainstream press, was not in itself a signal for any departure from the paper’s general conformism, but spoke of the disorientation under the new presidency of what had once been a compact organ of the Centre-Left establishment. Popular humours proved no more stable. The fall in Sarkozy’s own ratings, steep enough, could be regarded as par for the course at the Elysée since the nineties. Newer was not only the complete lack of any corresponding gain by the PS, but the re-emergence of a revolutionary phoenix to its left. Of the range of Trotskyist candidates standing in 2007, one only had more or less held onto previous ground, the young postman Olivier Besancenot, representing the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire. But that was at a mere 4 per cent of the vote, three times that of the PCF, but still reassuringly minimal.
By the autumn of 2008, however, disgust with the PS had become so widespread that Besancenot, an appealingly fresh face even to the media, suddenly soared past all possible Socialist leaders in the polls, becoming France’s leading alternative to Sarkozy in popular opinion. On the strength of this—personal and still, of course, virtual—showing, the Ligue decided to dissolve itself, and give birth to a New Anti-Capitalist Party, broader and more unsectarian in character. What its fortunes will be remains to be seen. Two years into the new presidency, the social and intellectual setting is not entirely unfavourable for it. France is the only major country in Europe where high school and university students have mobilized en masse, year after year, against governments of the day, creating a sub-culture of libertarian and solidaristic impulse likely to mark a generation. It is among this youth that the ideas of the most radical sector of the intelligentsia, once again often coming from philosophy, have gained ground, as the standing of Alain Badiou or Jacques Rancière attest. The new party might well prove marginal or ephemeral. Dependence on an individual shooting-star is one obvious danger. Another lies simply in the electoral system of the Fifth Republic, which in abolishing proportional representation was designed from the outset to cripple the PCF, and continues to corner any potential challenge to the system, by forcing adherence to whatever nominal alternative to the Centre-Right survives the first round—indeed, as 2002 showed, when Besancenot called on voters to rally to Chirac, in the last resort adherence to the Centre-Right itself, um schlechteres zu vermeiden. Since the New Anti-Capitalist Party has declared that it rejects on principle any alliance with the PS of the kind that destroyed the PCF, it could only escape the logic of the lesser evil lying ahead if it actually overtook the Socialists in the first round.
Notionally, that is not completely impossible. Two months into 2009, Besancenot was considered the best opponent of Sarkozy by the French, well ahead of all other possible candidates, and topping preferences for Aubry and Royal combined. Such ratings, however, come and go. What seems clear is that the dual voltage of France’s deep political culture, with its characteristically sudden switches from conformity to insurgency and back again, is not yet over. Less clear is which of these poles a deepening economic crisis will favour, or whether it might—as respectable opinion would wish—bring to an end, at last, their alternation.
1. Paris 2003, p. 131. For a pained reply from the juste milieu, see Alain Duhamel, Le désarroi français, Paris 2003, p. 163ff.
2. Pierre Péan and Philippe Cohen, La face cachée du Monde, Paris 2003, p. 604.
3. Paris 1997. This marvellous little dissection has gone through seventeen editions since it first appeared, for a sale of some 300,000 copies. No English equivalent exists, though The Guardian and its consorts cry out for one.
4. Pierre Grémion, ‘Ėcrivains et intellectuels à Paris. Une esquisse’, Le Débat, No. 103, January–February 1999, p. 75.
5. The best study of this phenomenon is Michael Christofferson’s meticulously documented French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s, New York 2004, passim.
6. Raymond Aron, ‘Incertitudes françaises’, Commentaire, No. 1, 1978, p. 15.
7. ‘Que peuvent les intellectuels?’, Le Débat, No. 1, March 1980, pp. 1–19; ‘Continuons Le Débat’, No. 21, September 1982, pp. 3–10.
8. ‘Au milieu du gué’, Le Débat, No. 14, June–July 1981, pp. 3–6.
9. Francois Furet and Denis Richet, La Révolution, 2 vols., Paris 1965–6; The French Revolution, London 1970.
10. L’Atelier de l’histoire, Paris 1982, pp. 24–5, 29; In th
e Workshop of History, Chicago 1984, pp. 16, 20.
11. La Révolution: de Turgot à Jules Ferry 1770–1880, Paris 1988; Revolutionary France 1770–1880, Oxford 1992.
12. ‘Journaliste et historien’, Commentaire, No. 84, Winter 1998–1999, p. 917.
13. The best critical assessment of the Dictionary is to be found in Isser Woloch, ‘On the Latent Illiberalism of the French Revolution’, American Historical Review, December 1990, pp. 1452–70.
14. For a lively account of Furet’s role in 1989, see Steven Kaplan, Farewell, Revolution: The Historians’ Feud, France, 1789–1989, Ithaca 1995, pp. 50–143, the second part of Kaplan’s survey of the Bicentennial, released two years earlier in a single French volume as Adieu 89.
15. ‘La France unie’, in François Furet, Jacques Julliard and Pierre Rosanvallon, La République du centre, Paris 1988, pp. 13–66.
16. ‘History has upheld us’. See ‘Dix ans de Débat’, Le Débat, No. 60, May–August 1990, pp. 4–5.
17. ‘Entre Mémoire et Histoire’, Les lieux de mémoire, I, La République, Paris 1984, p. xli. The English-language editions of the work do not correspond to the French, having been adapted for American readers.
18. ‘Présentation’, Les lieux de mémoire, II/I, La Nation, Paris 1986, pp. xix–xxi.
19. ‘Comment écrire l’histoire de la France?’, Les lieux de mémoire, III/I, Les France, Paris 1992, pp. 28–9.
20. Nora’s reserve towards Gaullism was consistent. One of his most interesting contributions to Les lieux de mémoire conjoins Gaullism with Communism as, each in its own way, vehicles of a powerful illusion.
21. ‘Présentation’, Les lieux de mémoire, I, p. xiii.
22. See, among others, Steven Englund, ‘The Ghost of Nation Past’, Journal of Modern History, June 1992, pp. 299–320, and David Bell, ‘Paris Blues’, The New Republic, 1 September 1997, pp. 32–6.
23. See Pierre Nora, Les Français d’Algérie, Paris 1961; and, for a brief glimpse, François Furet, Un itinéraire intellectuel. L’historien-journaliste, de France-Observateur au Nouvel Observateur (1958–1997), Paris 1999, pp. 60–64—a selection of texts by Mona Ozouf that does not linger on his early years. The extent of its omissions is demonstrated by Michael Christofferson in ‘François Furet Between History and Journalism, 1958–1965’, French History, Vol. 1, No. 4, 2001, pp. 421–7, who shows that Furet, writing under pseudonyms, was a prolific commentator on French politics, from a position well to the left of his later outlook, down to 1965.
24. ‘L’ère de la commémoration’, Les lieux de mémoire, III/III, Paris 1992, pp. 977–1012.
25. Mythologies, Paris 1957, pp. 222ff; significantly, the example Barthes used to analyze the nature of myth was an icon of imperial francité from Paris-Match, just what Les lieux de mémoire set out to forget.
26. An intelligent example is Pierre Manent, Histoire intellectuelle du libéralisme. Dix leçons, Paris 1987, which ends with this trio. It is characteristic of much of this French discussion that Mill does not rate a mention.
27. Denis Berger and Henri Maler, Une certaine idée du communisme, Paris 1996, p. 187.
28. François Furet, ‘Chronique d’une décomposition’, Le Débat, No. 83, January–February 1995, pp. 84–97.
29. Furet et al., La République du centre, pp. 58–62.
30. ‘L’utopie démocratique à l’américaine’, Le Débat, No. 69, March–April 1992, pp. 80–91; ‘L’Amérique de Clinton II’, Le Débat, No. 94, March–April 1997, pp. 3–10.
31. François Furet, ‘L’énigme française’, Le Débat, September–October 1997, pp. 43–9.
32. François Furet, Le Passé d’une illusion, Paris 1995, p. 579; The Passing of an Illusion, Chicago 1999, p. 502.
33. ‘L’idée française de la Révolution’, Le Débat, No. 96, September–October 1997, pp. 28–9.
34. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, ‘En lisant L’Idéologie française’, and Pierre Nora, ‘Un idéologue bien de chez nous’, Le Débat, No. 13, June 1981, pp. 97–109. A year earlier, Nora had written that Lévy possessed a kind of undeniable legitimacy, conferred by the genuine desire for knowledge that 100,000 readers had invested in him: Le Débat, No. 1, p. 9.
35. Daniel Lindenberg, Le rappel à l’ordre. Enquête sur les nouveaux réactionnaires, Paris 2002; and contra, Alain Finkielkraut, Marcel Gauchet, Pierre Manent, Philippe Muray, Pierre-André Taguieff, Shmuel Trigano, Paul Yonnet, ‘Manifeste pour une pensée libre’, L’Express, 28 November 2002. For a dry comment on the dispute, see Serge Halimi: ‘Un débat intellectuel en trompe l’oeil’, Le Monde diplomatique, January 2003, p. 3.
36. René Rémond, by no means a critic of the upshot, makes this argument: ‘Instabilité législative, continuité politique’, Le Débat, No. 110, May–August 2000, pp. 198–201.
37. Nicolas Véron, ‘Les heureuses mutations de la France financière’, Commentaire, No. 104, Winter 2003–4, offers a gratified balance-sheet of these changes.
38. Pierre Grémion, Le Débat, No. 103, January–February 1999, p. 99.
39. Le Pen got 230,000 votes more than in 1995, and his former lieutenant Bruno Mégret, who had split away from the FN, received 670,000, making a combined increase of 900,000. But in 1995 Philippe de Villiers had won 1,440,000 votes, with comparable appeals. In 2002 his Mouvement pour la France did not enter the presidential race.
40. Jean-Jacques Chevallier, Guy Carcassonne, Olivier Duhamel, La Ve République 1958–2002. Histoire des institutions et des régimes politiques en France, Paris 2002, p. 488; a standard reference work in France, as its publishers describe it.
41. For an extended statement, see his Homo Juridicus, London–New York 2007.
42. Les infortunes de la République, Paris 2000, p. 165.
43. Esquisse pour une auto-analyse, Paris 2004, pp. 117–27.
44. To select only one, often out of several, per case: Spain—Elliott; Italy—Mack Smith; Portugal—Boxer; Germany—Carsten; Netherlands—Israel; Sweden—Roberts; Poland—Davies; Hungary—Macartney; China—Needham; Spanish America—Lynch.
45. ‘La pensée réchauffée’, in La pensée tiède, Paris 2005, p. 101; as often happens in translation, a misleading title for the reflections above, since the principal ideas at issue were not tepid, nor were they only at issue, without reference to political life.
46. ‘La pensée réchauffée’, p. 111.
47. ‘La pensée réchauffée’, pp. 112–4.
48. ‘Fernand Braudel and National Identity’, A Zone of Engagement, London 1992, pp. 251–78.
49. Ce grand cadavre à la renverse, Paris 2007, pp. 9–16, 157–60, for the latter’s breathless account of how he was first wooed by his old friend Sarkozy, and then rallied to the ‘courage and solitude’ of Royal.
50. For an overall analysis of the vote, see Emmanuel Todd, Àprès la démocratie, Paris 2008, pp. 136–40.
51. Both before the first round: see ‘Avant qu’il ne soit trop tard’, Nouvel Observateur, 1 March 2007; and ‘Appel de 200 intellectuels pour Ségolène Royal’, Libération, 18 April 2007.
52. The most lucid analysis of the limitations of Sarkozy’s agenda is offered by Roland Hureaux: ‘Nicolas Sarkozy peut-il réussir?’, Le Débat, No. 146, September–October 2007, pp. 102–10.
53. Remark to a UMP deputy, reported in Le Monde, 13 December 2008.
54. For a sardonic report on the extent of politicians’ consultation of intellectuals, if not necessarily acceptance of their advice, see Jade Lindgard, ‘La grande “chasse aux idées”, ou comment les politiques en consomment un maximum, sans toujours s’en servir’, in Stéphane Beaud et al., La France invisible, Paris 2006, pp. 473–84, covering Sarkozy, Fabius, Bayrou and Royal.
55. Les enfants maudits de la République. L’avenir des intellectuels en France, Paris 2005, pp. 203–12.
56. Elsewhere, Noiriel himself—attractively capable of self-correction—has noted how little Foucault’s hunger for publicity and wild generalizations corresponded to the figure he recom
mended: Penser avec, penser contre. Itinéraire d’un historien, Paris 2003, p. 246.
57. De la division du travail social, Paris 1893, p. v. By 1915, he was telling his compatriots that an ‘aggressive temper, bellicose will, contempt for international law and human rights, systematic inhumanity, institutionalized cruelties’ were among the ‘multiple manifestations of the German soul’ (sic). Aganst the ‘morbid mentality’ and ‘social pathology’ of the ‘monster’ across the Rhine was ranged the legitimate confidence of France that behind it stood the superior force of the ‘nature of things’. ‘L’Allemagne au-dessus de tout’. La mentalité allemande et la guerre, Paris 1915, pp. 3, 46–7. Seignobos was a fellow-member of the committee publishing this rubbish. ‘Intellectuels spécifiques et intellectuels de gouvernment, même combat!’, Noiriel is obliged to note, after complaining that Nizan—whose scathing description of Durkheim’s efforts to give ‘official morality the appearance of science’ has lost none of its point—had linked the two men: Les fils maudits de la Republique, pp. 223–5; for Nizan on Durkheim, see Les chiens de garde, Paris 1932, pp. 189–92.
58. For apposite comment on this part of Les enfants maudits, and assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the book as a whole, see Serge Halimi’s review, ‘Une arrière-garde de l’ordre social’, Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2005.
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