The New Old World (38 page)

But the more significant reasons for the drop in influence lie in the conjuncture, and the relation of each project to its
moment. Furet was writing at the height of the restoration of the late seventies and eighties, when neo-liberalism was carrying all before it, and could concentrate his polemical gifts on demolition of the myths of the Revolution, Jacobin or Bolshevik. Rosanvallon operates in a far less favourable situation. Not only has the liberalism they stood for taken something of a battering in France, but in these lowering times a more awkward task has fallen to him: not so much attacking the old as embellishing the new, with a constructive interpretation of the changes that have supervened, as a work in progress towards a still more—‘wholly and completely'—liberal future. The result is a disabling quotient of euphemism, giving his output a pervasive air of blandness that has inevitably limited its appeal. The social dimension of this liberalism—the sense in which Rosanvallon claims ground to the left of the republican commitments of
Le Débat
—has not offset this handicap.
⁷⁰
If anything it has merely exposed him to the misfortunes of French Socialism at large, reducing him to the status of a local Giddens rather the loftier international models to which he aspires. Successive plunges into political waters have led only to a series of
déboires
: humiliation with Juppé in 1995, debacle over the European Constitution in 2006—he was beside himself at this victory of populism—and rebuff with Royal in 2007. The République des Idées remains active, even if a leading member of its network has already defected to Sarkozy, and Rosanvallon in reserve as counsellor to a future prince, should the PS recover. But, at any rate for the moment, what is striking is the gap between intention and effect.

What of French Socialism itself? The peculiarity of the PS, within the gamut of its sister parties in Western Europe, has long lain in a dual external determination setting it apart from even the Mediterranean counterparts closest to it. Like the Spanish, Portuguese and Italian parties of the eighties, it is an organization whose leaders come from the ranks of a sleek-suited technocracy and state administration; cadres and core electors, from whitecollar employees in the public sector; finances from businesses close to it; and media backing from
bon ton
press and periodicals. Like them, it lacks any trade-union base, and has virtually no proletarian roots.
⁷¹
Like them, too, it was a recent re-make, producing a political form little continuous with the past. But its genesis was otherwise quite different, not the transformation of an existing organization, but the creation of a new one out of a merger of several older organizations—a more difficult enterprise, whose condition was, in effect, an external federator. As architect of the PS, without whom it might not have come into being, and would certainly never have come to power when it did, Mitterrand belonged to no socialist tradition. Once president of the Republic, he controlled the party from afar, playing off its different components against one another, without ever becoming fully identified with it. The consequence, after his departure, was that French Socialism was left with a now entrenched factional structure, without its master-builder. The contrast with the disciplinary organizations of González, Craxi or Soares is marked. The PS has always been a much less unitary structure.

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, ‘
Ė
crivains 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 the 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.