Returning to Reims

by Didier Eribon

  So whose fault is it that the new representatives people turn to are of a certain ilk? Whose fault if the meaning of a “we” sustained or reconstituted in this way undergoes a transformation such that it comes to mean the “French” as opposed to “foreigners,” whereas it had used to mean “workers” as opposed to the “bourgeoisie”? Or, to put it more precisely, whose fault is it if the opposition between “worker” and “bourgeois,” even if it continues to exist in the form of an opposition between the “have nots” and the “haves” (which is not exactly the same opposition—it carries different political consequences), takes on a national and racial dimension, with the “haves” being perceived as favorably inclined to immigration and the “have nots” as suffering on a daily basis because of this same immigration, one that is held to be responsible for all their difficulties?

  The claim could be made that voting communist represented a positive form of self-affirmation, whereas voting for the National Front represented a negative one. (In the first case, the links to party structures, to party spokespersons, to the coherence of the political discourse in question and its correspondence to a certain class identity, were all quite strong and conclusive; but in the second case such links were nearly inexistent or else quite secondary.) Yet in both cases the outcome of the voting was meant to be, or became in fact, the public manifestation of a group that was giving itself an organization by means of votes cast individually, but also collectively, in order to make its voice heard. What organized itself around the Communist Party was the collective vote of a group conscious of itself and anchored both in the objective conditions of its existence and in a political tradition. Other categories would affiliate with this group when their perception of the world and their political agenda would align, in either the short or the long term, with those of the “working class” in its manifestation as a class-subject. By erasing any idea of social groups with conflicting relations to each other from leftist political discourse (indeed by going so far as to replace the structuring affirmation of a conflictual society, in which one’s obligation was to support the demands of the working class, with a denunciation of social movements that were claimed to be relics of the past, that were, along with their supporters, taken to be somehow archaic, or some kind of a sign of the deterioration of the social bond that the government’s project should be to restore), the goal was to succeed at depriving people who voted together of the possibility of thinking of themselves as a group held together by common interests and shared preoccupations. Their opinions were reduced to individual ones, and those opinions were dissociated from any of the power they might have held in the past, doomed henceforth to a kind of powerlessness. But that powerlessness turned into anger. The result was inevitable: the group reformed, but in a different way, and the class that had been deconstructed by the neoconservative discourses of the left found a new way to organize itself and to make its point of view known.

  One sees here the limits of the wonderful analysis Sartre gives of electoral systems and of election seasons as processes of individualization and therefore of the depoliticization of opinion—a “serial” kind of situation—, as opposed to the collective and politicizing formation of thought that happens in the course of a movement or a period of political mobilization—a “group” situation.6 It is certainly true that his example is striking: the workers who participated in the major strikes of May 1968 but then only a month later saved the Gaullist regime by voting for its candidates. Yet this example shouldn’t cause us to forget that the act of voting, while fundamentally individual in appearance, can be experienced as part of a collective mobilization, as a political action carried out in common with others. Viewed in this way, it contravenes the very principle of the system of “universal suffrage,” in which the aggregation of individual voices is meant to produce the expression of the “general will” that in theory transcends any particular desires. But in the situation I have just described (voting communist or voting for the National Front), the opposite happens: a class war is carried out at the ballot box, a practice of confrontation is reproduced election after election, in which one class—or a part of one class—is seen doing its best to make its presence manifest in the face of others, to set up a power relation. Merleau-Ponty, too, while emphasizing that “the vote consults people at rest, outside their job, outside their life,” that is, according to an abstract and individualizing logic, insists on the fact that “when we vote, it is a form of violence”: “Each rejects the suffrage of the others.”7 Far from seeking to collaborate in defining all together what the “general will” of the people might be, far from contributing to the establishment of a consensus or to the emergence of a majority to whose wishes a minority would agree to acquiesce, the working class, or some part of it (and in this it is like any other class: think of the reaction of the bourgeoisie each time the left is elected to power), is there ready to contest the claim that some elected majority represents the “general” point of view by recalling that it considers this majority’s point of view to be that of an adversary who is defending its own interests in opposition to one’s own. As far as the vote for the National Front is concerned, this process by which a political self is constructed happened through an alliance—at least while the electoral campaign was underway—with social strata that at other times would have been considered to be made up of “enemies.” The major effect of the disappearance of the “working class” and of workers—or even, we might say, of the popular classes more generally—from political discourse will thus have been the weakening of the long-standing alliances formed under the banner of “the left” between the working-class world and certain other social categories (workers in the public sector, teachers, and so on), and the formation of a new “historical bloc,” to use Gramsci’s vocabulary, bringing together large portions of the vulnerable popular classes living under conditions of precarity with shopkeepers and tradespeople, or with well-to-do retirees in the south of France, or even with fascist military types or traditional old Catholic families, and thus largely located on the right or even the far right.8 But this was doubtless what was required at a given moment in order to have any political weight—all the more so since that weight had to be thrown against the left that was in power or, more exactly, against the power that the parties of the left incarnated. Indeed, this gesture was perceived as the only way to go on living. Yet obviously, with the formation of new alliances and new political configurations, this group—which included only a part of the former group organized around voting communist—became different from what it had been. Those who made it up began thinking of themselves, of their political interests and of their relations to political and social lives in completely different ways.

  Voting for the National Front was probably not, for most of these voters, the same kind of thing that voting for the Communist Party had been: this new vote was more intermittent and less consistent. It was not with the same solidarity or the same intensity that people gave themselves or their thoughts over to the spokespersons who would represent them on the political stage. By means of their vote for the Communist Party, individuals went beyond what they were separately or serially, and the collective opinion that was produced through the mediation of the Party, which both shaped and expressed it, was in no way the reflection of the various heterogeneous opinions of any of the voters; but in voting for the National Front, individuals remain individuals and the opinion they produce is simply the sum of their spontaneous prejudices, latched onto by the party, and taken up and formulated into a coherent political program. Yet even if those people who vote for the party do not subscribe to the entirety of its program, the strength gained by the party in this way allows it to believe that its voters are in agreement with its whole discourse.

  It is tempting to say that what we have in this case is a serial collective, one deeply marked by seriality—given that what predominates here are impulsive reactions, opinions that may be shared but are more received ones t
han they are interests thought out collectively or opinions arrived at through practical forms of action. It is a kind of alienated vision (leveling accusations at foreigners) rather than a politicized concept (a struggle against domination). Nonetheless, this “collective” becomes a “group” by means of its vote for a party which can then, with the consent of those voters, instrumentalize the very means of expression chosen and used by those who themselves instrumentalized that party in order to make their voices heard.9

  We should in any case remark that to a large degree voting for someone rarely amounts to more than a partial or oblique adherence to the discourse or platforms of the party or the candidate in question—and this is true for all voters. When I observed to my mother that by voting for Le Pen she had supported a party that actively opposed abortion rights, whereas I knew she had had an abortion, she replied: “But that’s got nothing to do with it. That’s not why I voted for him.” If that is the case, then how does someone choose the elements that count, that weigh in favor of a decision to vote for a candidate, and the elements that are deliberately set aside? Surely the essential factor is the feeling of knowing or believing that you are being both individually and collectively represented, even if it is in an incomplete and imperfect kind of way. That is, what counts is that one feels supported by those one supports; one has the impression of existing and of counting for something in the life of politics by means of participating in an election, by means of a decision to act in this way.

  These two antagonistic political visions (the one embodied in a vote for the Communist Party, and the one embodied in a vote for the National Front), these two modes of constituting oneself as a political subject relied on different categories for perceiving and dividing up the social world. (These divergent categories of perception could certainly co-exist in a single individual, caught up in different temporalities of course, but also tied to different places, related to different structures of daily life in which that individual may be involved: it might depend on whether the accent is placed on the practical solidarity that functions within the confines of the factory or the feeling of competition involved in holding on to one’s job, or whether the accent is placed on the feeling of belonging to an informal network of parents who pick up their children from the same school or on a feeling of exasperation at how difficult life in the neighborhood is becoming, and so on.) They are opposite, or at least divergent, ways of dividing up social reality and of trying to exercise some influence on the political orientation of those in the government, but the two ways are not mutually exclusive. That is why, however long-lasting and however disconcerting the alliances that went into forming the National Front electorate may be, it is not at all impossible, and even less is it unthinkable, that some of those people—and only some of them—might be found in a more or less near future voting for the extreme left. This is not to say that the extreme left and the extreme right should be placed on the same level—as is often done by those people who are trying to protect their monopoly over what can be said to constitute legitimate politics. (They make this claim by systematically accusing any point of view, any act of self-affirmation that doesn’t correspond to their definition of politics of being “populist.” Such accusations merely reveal their lack of understanding—which is class-based—of what they take to be the “irrationality” of the people whenever they do not simply agree to submit to the “reason” and “wisdom” of those in power.) But it is to say that the political mobilization of a group—the world of workers and of the popular classes—by means of electoral politics can shift its location radically on the political chessboard; if the overall situation (national and international) shifts, such a mobilization could crystallize within the framework of a different “historical bloc” involving other segments of society. Yet doubtless a certain number of significant events have to take place—strikes, protests, and so on—for any such transformation to come about. It is not all that easy to undo a mental sense of political belonging that is of long duration—even when that sense has been unstable and uncertain—, just as it is not possible to create in a single day a new way of relating to oneself and to others, a new way of looking at the world, a different discourse on the way life works.

  2

  I am, of course, aware of the fact that both the discourse and the success of the National Front were in many ways encouraged by, and even seemed an answer to, feelings that had a lively presence in the popular classes in the 1960s and 1970s. If someone had wanted to deduce a political program from the kinds of remarks that were made on a daily basis in my family during those years, at a time when everyone was still voting on the left, the result would not have been very different from the future electoral platforms of this far right party in the 1980s and 1990s: a desire to deport immigrants and to set up a system of “national preferences” for employment and for social services, support for an increasingly repressive penal system, for the idea of capital punishment and the widespread application of it, support for the right to leave school at age 14, and so on. The extreme right’s ability to attract those who had previously voted communist (or to appeal to younger voters who started out voting for the National Front, since it seems that children of workers voted for the extreme right both more easily and more systematically than did their elders10) was made possible or at least facilitated by the profound racism that constituted one of the dominant characteristics of white working and lower class circles. Remarks that would flourish everywhere and be directed at Maghrebi families in the 1980s—“It’s an invasion; they are taking over;” “They’re getting all the welfare payments, and leaving nothing for us,” and so on, ad nauseum—had been preceded for at least thirty years by radically hostile ways of perceiving workers who came from the Maghreb, of speaking with them, and of behaving towards them.11 This hostility was already visible both during the Algerian War (“If they want their independence so badly, why can’t they just stay at home?”), and after Algeria had won its independence (“They wanted their independence. Now that they have it, it’s time they went home.”). But it became even worse throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The scorn that the French felt for them would be apparent notably in the way they were systematically addressed with the pronoun tu instead of vous. When people talked about them, the only words used were bicots, ratons, or other highly insulting terms. In those years, “immigrants” were mostly single men who lived in hostels and insalubrious hotels, where “sleep merchants” increased their profits by inflicting degrading living conditions on them. That would all change with the massive arrival of a new generation of immigrants, and also with the establishment of families and the birth of children: an entire population of people with origins outside France would move into the large low income housing projects that had only recently been built, and that had until then only been lived in by French people or by immigrants from other European countries. When, in the mid 1960s, my parents obtained an apartment in one of those housing projects on the edge of town, where I would live between the ages of 13 and 20, only white people lived in the building. It was towards the end of the 1970s—I had been gone for a long while—that Maghrebi families moved in, rapidly becoming the largest group in the neighborhood. These changes caused a dramatic exacerbation of the racist impulses that had always been present in everyday conversations. Yet it was as if what was happening was the creation of two different levels of consciousness that only rarely came into contact, since this new situation didn’t seem to interfere immediately with the reasoned political choices people were making, be it choosing to vote for a political party—“the Party”—that had actively opposed the war in Algeria, or becoming a member of a union—the CGT—that was at least officially opposed to racism, or, more generally, maintaining one’s perception of oneself as a leftist member of the working class.

  In fact, when people voted for the left, in a certain way they voted against certain kinds of unthinking impulses, and thus against a part of themselves. The racist feelings in q
uestion were certainly strong ones and, in fact, the Communist Party was not above encouraging them in quite odious ways on a number of occasions. But they never became established as the kernel of a set of political preoccupations. Sometimes, in fact, people felt obliged to apologize for such remarks when they made them to a circle that was larger than that of the immediate family. In such circumstances, it was not at all unusual to hear sentences that began “I’ve never been racist, but …,” or that ended, “Not that I’m racist, of course.” Or else someone would intersperse the conversation with remarks such as, “They are like any group; they aren’t all bad,” and then someone would mention the example of this or that “buddy” at the factory as a fellow who had done this or that. And so on. It took time for the daily expressions of ordinary racism to join up with more directly ideological elements and become transformed into a hegemonic way of perceiving the social world. This was something that happened under the effect of a discourse that was organized in such a way so as to encourage such forms of expression and give them meaning on a public stage.

  It was because my parents couldn’t bear the new environment that had become predominant in their old neighborhood any longer that they decided to move out of their apartment there and into a housing development in Muizon. They were running away from what seemed to them to be a set of enormous new threats that had erupted into a world that had once been theirs, and that they felt was being taken away from them. My mother began complaining about the “swarms” of children belonging to the new arrivals who urinated and defecated in the stairways and who, once they were teenagers, transformed the housing complex into a world of delinquency, producing a climate of fear and insecurity. She was indignant about the way the building was becoming run down—the walls of the stairways, the doors to the basement storage rooms, the mailboxes in the entryway would no sooner be repaired than they’d be damaged or defaced again; people’s mail and newspapers were stolen regularly. This is not to mention all the damage done to cars parked in the streets: side mirrors broken, paintwork scratched, and so on. She could no longer bear the incessant noise and the smells of a kind of cooking that was unfamiliar to her, nor the cries of the sheep that was butchered in the bathroom of the apartment above hers to celebrate Eid al-Kabir. Did her descriptions really correspond to the reality around her or only to her fantasies? Most likely both at once. I no longer lived with them and never visited them, so I have no way of judging. When I would say to her on the telephone—for she would talk about almost nothing else—that she must be exaggerating, she would reply: “It’s obvious that you don’t live here and that it’s not like that where you live.” What could I say? Still, I ask myself about how certain discourses come into being, discourses that serve to transform problems of how to get along with your neighbors—and no doubt these are weighty problems—into a way of conceiving of the world, into a system of political thought. What histories are such discourses tied to? From what social depths do they arise? Based on what new modalities for constituting political subjectivities do they coagulate and take solid form as a vote for a party of the extreme right and for the kind of leader who had until then inspired only reactions of violent anger? Once such discourses had been ratified by and started reverberating within the mediatized space of politics, these spontaneous categories of perception, and the divisions they relied on (“French” people as opposed to “foreigners”) began imposing themselves as somehow ever more “obvious.” They were taken up more and more frequently in banal daily conversations within immediate families, within extended families, or while out shopping, or in the street, or at work, and so on. A crystallization of racist feeling was taking place in the social and political spaces that had previously been dominated by the Communist Party, and with it came a marked tendency to turn towards something on offer in the political world and claiming to be nothing other than an echo of the voice of the people and of a national feeling. In fact, it was this very political offering that had produced such sentiments in their present form by providing a coherent discursive framework and a social legitimacy to preexisting ill feelings and affects of resentment. The “common sense” that was shared by the “French” popular classes underwent a profound transformation, precisely because the quality of being “French” became its central element, replacing the quality of being a “worker,” or a man or woman of the “left.”