France's Unstable Stability
SCHWARTZ, PAUL WALDO
THE POLITICS OF PARADOX France's Unstable Stability BY PAUL WALDO SCHWARTZ Paris Any major election here leaves the walls of Paris vibrating with color. First party A slaps up its posters, then...
...One coined during the mai-juin revolt of 1968 reads, "Imagination Takes Power," a claim singled out by Andre Malraux as singularly meaningless...
...Though violence still threatens to break out at any time, the oddly unstable stability presided over by President Georges Pompidou may be an uncanny reflection of France's sociological profile at this moment...
...Ah, but why do all the political posters in Paris end by being illegible...
...The Communists say, we will take it away from them and give it to you...
...Freudians would be quick to observe that the Gallic infant is flung from the womb to the pottie in no time at all...
...Paul Waldo Schwartz is a freelance writer who lives in Paris...
...in the evenings she went to party meetings...
...Now that last month's municipal elections have verified the nation's political impasse--with the Gaullist-weighted majority on one side, the Communist-dominated opposition on the other, and the Socialists crushed into paralysis in-between--a set of question marks trails off into the future...
...On Sundays she sold VHumanite-Dimanche in the streets...
...For if there is a political calm here that few want to disturb, there is also a prevailing frustration that most want to change...
...In fact, the police in France are a symbol of paternal will, and the paternal voice is the first and perhaps ultimate target of revolution in this country...
...In the Metro station at Chatelet, a new inscription declares: "What Do We Want...
...They are a miniscule group, but they mean business...
...Yet this is a society that has rejected the non-Communist Left at the polls--perhaps because it frowns upon compromise...
...on weekdays she fretted over her property...
...Would it not be more efficacious for each party to ignore the others' posters...
...On the Boulevard Saint Michel, not the choicest street on the Left Bank, numerous men's shops feature ever more elaborate discotheque-style window displays of $12 ties, $16 shirts and $50 shoes--which seem to be selling...
...The limited liberty that results from compromise is neither undiluted freedom nor a reason to revolt...
...The Paris police chief said in March that "A country has the police it deserves...
...Significantly, even General Charles de Gaulle deemed it politically wise not to introduce speed limits...
...The weekly he Nouvel Observateur replied in an editorial: "If we deserve our police, that is because we deserve our government and our society...
...they used to count on picking up damaged vegetables there at little or no cost...
...French children do not dirty their clothes when they play in the Tuileries...
...But her own two chairs were presumably inviolable...
...Next A's people rip off B's--along with their own--and paste up a new A broadside...
...In this respect, the student slogans scrawled throughout the Left Bank are illuminating...
...The trouble is that it would also run counter to some of the basic nervous drives of a French political contest...
...respect law and despise authority, the French respect authority and despise law...
...The disappearance of a supreme and arrogant father figure as chief of state has defused one of the most subliminal sources of opposition to the Fifth Republic...
...To her communism meant justice for the lady who is glutted with period chairs and who, after the revolution, would be compelled to share them with the proletariat...
...The helmeted, billy club-and tear-gas-brandishing brigade units bludgeoned etudiants and etudiantes alike during the 1968 riots...
...he is always being photographed in shirtsleeves, a cigarette dangling from his lips as he talks to the locals as an equal...
...Along the adjacent streets live some people so poor that the closing of the central food markets across the river at Les Halles represents a personal hardship...
...And, further, the more this order is contested the less it can be legitimately defended...
...With help from parties C, D and E, this process continues until a handsome collage of shape, color and lettering is produced, almost Cubist in design and esthetically impressive...
...A 19th-century Frenchman studying Britain concluded that the English...
...The death rate remains staggering...
...Then there are the masked, spear-wielding zealots of the neo-fascist, proto-Nazi Ordre Nouveau...
...One does not quite see how men charged with maintaining a rejected order can very well be loved...
...A further paradox is the contradictory effect of de Gaulle's replacement by Pompidou...
...They went about distributing leaflets, chatting with citizens and explaining to skeptics that "We are not the special brigades...
...Politically, of course, the result is a mute gesture...
...At least one's own cause would have its forum...
...What Is Intolerable Will No Longer Be Tolerated" asserts another...
...Everything--and the Rest...
...Before the elections, the order held a mass meeting--banned by the government--and was met by squads of riot police as well as by a crowd of avengers from the Left...
...In this case, the relative authorities of the police and the Constitution are not mentioned...
...No one doubts that student protests, sometimes legitimate, sometimes purely provocative, will resume...
...If not an affront to personal liberty, the speed limit is certainly regarded by most Frenchmen as a restriction on competition and self-assertion...
...The de-lenders of order must be judged as much on the nature of the order they are defending as on the fashion in which they are defending it...
...THE POLITICS OF PARADOX France's Unstable Stability BY PAUL WALDO SCHWARTZ Paris Any major election here leaves the walls of Paris vibrating with color...
...On the other side of the barricades are the police, once again the subject of much discussion...
...Pompidou has dared to set them, but sparingly, and not on all the roads...
...They are charming, and behave like perfect adults--at least until they get their driver's licenses...
...Last month the street patrolmen--the kepi-capped but no longer caped fellows in the "April in Paris" tourist posters--launched a "Smile Campaign" to ingratiate themselves with the populace...
...The 1968 slogan, "Beneath the Paving Stones, the Beach," similarly has to be the most blatantly bourgeois call to the barricades ever devised...
...First party A slaps up its posters, then party B rolls out its own on top of party A's...
...Why were they willing to hand the government the gift of a far more Left-leaning image, since grey is whiter when seen against black...
...If France is a country devoted to revolution, however, it is equally one of the most "acquisitive" societies on earth...
...The heart of the problem is economic: rising prices, insufficient housing, a general imbalance in the nation's wealth...
...Once again, the eternal issue of sovereignty, the source of order and power, the substratum of French politics, is called into question...
...The state and the challenger each claim legitimacy...
...In response, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts--a shrine of dissent ever since its presses started turning out underground material three years ago--has produced a new poster: a kepied policeman offering a bouquet of flowers, overshadowed by a menacing riot squad member, and captioned, "We Are Not All Fascists...
...La liberte is a cherished word in the French lexicon, but a strong case can be made that what is really relished here is not so much liberty as perpetual revolution or, more precisely, the fight for freedom...
...During the first week of March, even the price of coffee at a cafe counter went up 20-30 per cent or more, depending on the proprietor...
...This has shifted the paternal onus--for there has to be one--back to the police, a more inflammatory and accessible target, thus increasing the danger of violence...
...Why, one may ask, did partisans of the Left choose to fight alongside the official special brigades...
...In this light, too, a Socialist formula lacks glamor...
...The story is told of a Communist landlady, unlikely as that may sound, a war horse for the cause who worried about her two period chairs...
...Their symbol is the Celtic Cross (borrowed from the former terrorist, French-Algerian oas), which they proudly tout as "even older than the swastika...
...Pompidou has been methodically cultivating his toned-down image to full advantage...
Vol. 54 • April 1971 • No. 8
