Eminentoes / François Mitterrand: The Glamor of Tedium
Kaplan, Roger
choose; their destiny is theirs. But many of the same readers who once applauded the "Marxist-Christian dialogue" exemplified in Cox, Garaudy, and Bloch are now devotees of Segondo,...
...government is controlled lock, stock, and barrel by evil, scheming, bloodless monsters who live on Wall Street...
...An enormous singular presence on the rim of Central Park, it confronts the east side of Manhattan with an overwhelming stately grandeur that reduces the facing towering apartment houses to insignificance...
...And "Higher, Ever Higher" depicting a strapping couple performing work for the motherland on an electrical tower...
...T)he Common Program is a summary of all the recipes which have led socialism everywhere in the past to failure...
...He would not merely oppose, he would raise high the banner of the socialist millennium and incarnate in his successive candidacies the emotionally powerful, irrelevant, tried and failed goals of the classic left...
...The Common Program, which he defends more strenuously the closer he comes to victory, calls for systematic nationalization of industrial and financial institutions, and demands massive state intervention in every sector of the economy...
...Each single voice counts...
...Here, too, good will and "openness" exceed respect for harsh historical closures...
...Revel does not exaggerate when he calls the far-left intellectuals of the Socialist Party the Communists' Trojan Horse...
...Against this appeal to France's national traditions, the left is countering with its own, and for a year the walls will be plastered with the clenched fist grasping a Roger Kaplan, a native of Paris, is a doctoral candidate with the Committee on the History of Culture at the University of Chicago...
...His economic ideas, never very sophisticated, became demagogic slogans...
...It is nothing but the rancid odor of the cacklings of gloating little commissars, sensing the nearness of the time when their unspeakably boring dreams will become everyone's nightmare...
...Some time within the next year the French will choose a new legislature, and according to the weekly L 'Express, if the pattern that revealed itself locally translates nationally, the present governing majority will shrink to 219 seats, while the combined leftists will get 271...
...He not only means that they are arguing the Communist line in their party's councils when they take intransigent stands for rapid nationalization, reductions in the defense budget, and the like...
...Francois Mitterrand, born in 1916, loves to tell it as much as anyone and repeats it endlessly...
...Hoving, the Met became known for its spectacular "blockbuster exhibitions": the tremendously popular French Impressionist show of 1974, for instance, or the slickly banal "World of Jefferson and Franklin" of the bicentennial year...
...Giscard d'Estaing, while without much doubt a statesman in the grand French The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1977 21 tradition of opportunism and pretentiousness, has been trying to introduce some fresh air into French society, and it has been his bad luck to want to improve his compatriots' standard of living during a period of oil crisis and high inflation...
...So instead of policies the French present their colors, and there is almost nothing they enjoy telling you more than whether they are men of the right, or men of the left...
...But many of the same readers who once applauded the "Marxist-Christian dialogue" exemplified in Cox, Garaudy, and Bloch are now devotees of Segondo, Gutierrez, and others...
...and warning his countrymen of the collectivist menace...
...Conformist in manners and fashion, they cherish their few opportunities to do what they want the way they want to...
...Meanwhile, Chirac, whether because he senses that this is politically hopeless or undesirable, or because he has fewer anxieties about the need for reforms, is for taking the left head-on with the argument that social legislation in a period of economic difficulty is unrealistic (even if this means losing left-of-center votes...
...but also that they fail to recognize the limits to the amount of reform a society can take all at once, and that their stubborn, moralistic, old-fashioned socialist purism will very probably precipitate a crisis--a crisis which the well-disciplined, ruthless, unscrupulous Communists will be in a far better position than they to exploit when the whole pot-au-feu starts its way down the skids...
...After several years of trial and error it began to pay off: A new Socialist Party, with Mitterrand as First Secretary, took the place of the SFIO in 1971, on the basis of two glorious nineteenth century slogans: for a complete break with capitalist society and for the expropriation by the state of all means of production, exchange, and culture...
...Only recently, abstract artists had found their work ravaged by bulldozers in Red Square...
...In turn, this required convincing his own followers that the Communists could be trustworthy allies...
...Under its former director, Thomas P.F...
...The principal campaign poster of their leader, First Secretary of the party, Frangois Mitterrand, shows him serenely walking along a beach in a raincoat, under a legend: "Socialism, an idea making its way...
...On the basis of this union, Mitterrand won 49.5 percent of the votes in the presidential elections of 1974...
...Yet we have a lot of intellectuals too...
...Despite, or perhaps because of, all the red tape they put up with, their unitary educational system, and their rigid administration, the French are a very individualistic people...
...Savrasov's "Sunset over the Bog" belongs in a travel brochure, Vasnetsov's "Battle of the Scythians and the Slavs" resembles a cowboy and Indian picture in an Arizona county historical society, and Shishkin's "Pine Forest in Viatsk Province" reminds one of the drab reproductions found in dentists' offices...
...The intellectuals--both right and left--usually come from backgrounds where the power of the state is taken for granted...
...But the charge is serious...
...Sycophants of the Kremlin, apologists for Stalin, expert Big Liars, doctrinaire and boundlessly patient, the French Communists kept their grip on a very large block of the industrial working class because no other party came forward to fight consistently for its bread-and-butter interests during the period of reconstruction following the war, a period unfortunately dragged out by the painful and costly travails of decolonization in Indochina and Algeria...
...cries Jacques Chirac, "In the defense of liberty...
...IV "To arms, citizens...
...9 Q q Q 6 6 S t q ~ q l t ~ Q O ~ O Q ~ 6 ~ g e U ~ Q I ~ O ~ S t l W O W V ~ n t ~ . . . . . U . . . . . . I O D O I O ~ Q Q t O Q ~ I ~ m O ~ O O ~ * t O ~ Q ~ b ~ I ~ I O ~ . . . . ~ a O ~ U i J . . . . . O ~ I ~ U W ~ I ~ O ~ . . . . . ~ EMINENTOES by Roger Kaplan Frangois Mitterrand" The Glamor of Tedium May 12, 1977 The campaigns for the more than 38,000 municipalities of France are finished and the candidates of the Union de la Gauche (the Socialist-Communist alliance) have won a resounding victory, gaining control of some two-thirds of the cities of over 30,000 inhabitants...
...Even in its insults, especially in its insults, the French left sticks to its dear old symbols...
...Precocious youth from a solid, bourgeois, and Catholic family, he played an active and courageous role in the Resistance, studied law, entered politics, and became the youngest minister in the musical-chairs governments of the sad Fourth Republic...
...And now they are riding high, burning with their sense of a mission which has been repressed for a hundred years and more...
...For Mitterrand's conversion to doctrinaire socialism had been swift and thorough...
...Lenin...
...It is the fruit not of an original and contemporary interpretation of our societies, but of the ideological alignment of the Socialists with the Communists and with the most worn-out clich6s of the Marxist catechism...
...For calling for prudence in austere times, for warning of the stick-in-the-muddish redistributionist follies of the opposition, Chirac has been called a fascist...
...The exhibit begins with a room of fourteenth- to seventeenthcentury religious icons of uneven quality, several truly beautiful but some rather awkward...
...he is profoundly and sincerely a man of the left...
...But they are all but submerged by innumerable illustrations of quintessential schmaltz...
...Vree, in a word, has fired only an opening shot in what is shaping up as the great intellectual struggle of the decade of the '80s (which will include 1984...
...In the meantime, the antiCommunists are squabbling...
...There is "Putting the Shot," featuring a powerful woman shot putter...
...The plain fact is that the leaders of the French left need to believe there are fascists abroad in order to justify to themselves and to the electorate the measures they will take to ensure that the right does not get a chance to turn the clock back...
...For despite much talk of periodic cultural "thaws," this after all was a system that rewarded its greatest poet, Mandelstam, with death, that honored its Nobel Prize winning novelists by forcing one, Pasternak, to reject the award and another, Solzhenitsyn, to leave the country, and that rebutted the satire of Sinyavsky and Daniel Thomas Halper is chairman of the political science department at Baruch College in the City University of New York...
...This is why they have so much difficulty understanding American government, which they assume too often to be identical with U.S...
...Mitterrand has been making his way, true enough, he may yet be president of France and has an excellent crack at the premiership, and he and his ideas have all the relevance and excitement of a wet sock...
...The advantages of Mitterrand's strategy were very appealing: The Communists' safe votes, the tremendous appeal of the old dogmas of the left, and his own reputation as a brilliant, democratic intellectual untainted by the backroom hanky-panky of the old SFIO added up to a powerful political sum...
...As Revel points out, it is useless to argue with them...
...We owe Vree gratitude for his...
...How can they be expected to worry about the momentary discomforts which their policies will inflict ? They despise their countrymen's pusillanimity, their avarice, their bourgeois instincts...
...having] afforded the artist unique opportunities," of the Soviet effort "to create a revolutionary art for a revolutionary society," of the "traditions of Soviet culture," and so on...
...For Revel is alone against the ghosts of the gauche, and what can he, who shared Mitterrand's dreams of social justice, reply to their fables ? He can only remark sadly (L'Express, 21 March 1977): "What deserves criticism is not what left-wing voters want but what the high commands of the left are preparing to offer them instead of what they want...
...Actually, their concept of modem capitalism, let alone of American financial institutions, is about as up-to-date as a dead armadillo in the icebox...
...This success, together with his poskion as a vociferous anti-Gaullist since the beginning of the Fifth Republic, won him the respect of liberal anti-Gaullists like Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber and JeanFrangois Revel...
...His favorite term for capitalism is simply: "the monopolies...
...They are French Marxists--a particularly vicious, sanctimonious, selfrighteous, and fanatical lot...
...I had seen the exquisite gold of the Scythian exhibit lent by the Soviets a few years earlier, but I was nonetheless skeptical about this show...
...Strangling might be a better way to put it, but the Socialists, who won about 30 percent of the votes (the Communists received just under 20 percent and the small parties affiliated with the Union about 4 percent), want very badly to appear stylish and contemporary and attuned with reality...
...The bourgeoisie --the French have given us that word, too --has a real and quite reasonable fear of an ossified French left, for all its pious declarations of intent regarding basic freedoms...
...Thomas Halper The Commissars" Art Soviet painting at the Met The Metropolitan Museum of Art is where aspiring sophisticates go to church...
...And a pair of hagiographical studies of V.I...
...In gushing prose on the "unprecedented creativity and versatility of the avant garde" from 1908 to 1925, it is somehow 22 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1977...
...Mitterrand's strategy was to build a left block so strong that the Communist Party could not fail to be tempted by the chance to form a potentially winning coalition with it...
...There was obviously hope that he would work to build a responsible left opposition, something the much admired Pierre Mend~s-France had never quite pulled off for the simple reason that he always seemed to prefer being a minor20 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1977 ity of one...
...in all probability their first jobs were as high civil servants...
...red rose...
...But what really impresses, of course, is what is inside the edifice...
...They are the types who have never doubted that the U.S...
...Who, in the midst of this, could not be awed...
...He is not afraid of speaking for his side in the language of religious enthusiasm: "Europe will be socialist or it will be nothing...
...For through the doors and beyond the glorious rotunda always filled with enough fresh flowers for a gangster's funeral, is art so numerous and varied, so staggering in delicacy and power that one is almost forced to entertain the possibility of the eventual salvation of the human race that created it all...
...Beware of a nation that takes its history dramatically, instead of studying it...
...The average Frenchman has an astounding ineptitude when it comes to defining what he wants in matters of public policy, mostly because he spends so much of his time grumbling about the way things are--as well he might: The only thing he knows for sure is that the top-heavy, excessively centralized, meanly bureaucratic government is constantly stepping on his toes and every janitor in the post office thinks of himself as some kind of Napoleon...
...Is it the narcissistic obtuseness of intellectuals...
...That invitations to tyranny should parade under the flag of "liberation," however, is an irony too heavy to bear...
...Definitely a man of centrist, gradualist instincts, he wants to build a social democracy while loosening some of the state's centralizing powers (if this is possible...
...He needs, therefore, political support from the left-of-center, and is trying to break the rigidity of the left and right...
...III The Common Program was too much for the liberals who had already begun taking their distance from Mitterrand...
...ServanSchreiber wrote in the spring of 1974, when Mitterrand and Giscard d'Estaing were competing for the Presidency, that having some Communists in a French government might be tolerable if it were not for their irresponsible economic platform...
...A pair of portraits by the great Serov are lovely, but they are nearly hidden by the surrounding aesthetic debris...
...His posters boldly depict the Gaullist Cross of Lorraine emblazoned upon the revolutionary bonnet of 1789...
...Nor was all of this in the remote past...
...Mitterrand had other plans...
...He was a member of an independent left-of-center group and did not by any means always go along with the old socialists of the SFIO...
...There is a high wind over the country," announced Mitterrand when the results of the municipal elections came in...
...In Mitterrand's speeches the multinational corporations are invested with an evil genius which they use to enslave workers the world over...
...There are a couple of fine Kandinskys, a striking study of a young woman by Bakst, and a few others of geunine interest by such modernists as Malevich, Rodchenko, and Popova...
...When a clamor like this is raised, how far can the intelligent and reasoned tones of a social-democrat like Revel carry...
...The inevitable confiscatory effects of the Common Program are not the least bit reassuring to a people that in many ways is quite miserly...
...business interests, themselves assumed to be monolithic...
...While President Giscard d'Estaing tries to conciliate the social-democratic left, Jacques Chirac, leader of the Rassemblement pour la Rtpublique (Gaullist Party) and newly elected mayor of Paris--he defeated the President's hand-picked candidate in the first round of voting--is sounding the old alarum, "To arms, citizens...
...Now the campaign for France is beginning...
...Right, left: they cannot live, evidently, without the archaic symbolisms expressed by these political terms which have their origins in the National Assembly of the revolutionary period...
...II Actually, the campaign for France has been going on for such a long time that one may wonder what the French would be like without it...
...France is a highly centralized country, with a formidable state apparatus...
...Its big new exhibit is "Russian and Soviet Painting," and the other night a friend and I attended the opening...
...We may hope that he prompts each reader to think, and then another, and another, until good people stand fast together and launch a counterattack that will carry us beyond the present inadequacies of democratic capitalism and the present inadequacies of democratic socialism, to a vision more worthy of free and creative peoples...
...Dehumanization of the opponent and corruption of the language travel together, as always...
...Meanwhile, in descriptive statements affixed to the exhibit's walls, the Met speaks of "the establishment of the Ministry of Enlightenment...
...When asked what he understands by socialism he answers: "justice...
...Mitterrand is now surrounded by people who take it for granted that only the CIA has prevented the teeming masses of the world from embracing their uplifting prescriptions, cooked up around 1880, for the final improvement of mankind...
...Alas, they have too much history: all those risings, all those heroes, all those failures...
...In 1965 their southern chieftain, Craston Deferre, stumbled on his way to challenging Charles de Gaulle in the presidential election...
...It is not just history that they take too seriously, it is themselves...
...with long years of imprisonment at hard labor...
...And in the summer of 1972, the Communists and the Socialists formed the Union of the Left, promulgating a document known as the Common Program...
...There is indeed, and he and Comrade Georges Marchais of the Communist Party are well placed to smell what it carries...
...With the twentieth-century paintings, the story is even worse...
...Is it really just an unwillingness to look reality in the face and learn from it, when books have it down so much more neatly...
...Why did he need the Communists ? Since the end of World War II, up to 20 percent of the French electorate has given its votes with dismal regularity to one of the most reactionary, shameless, discredited, and autocratic organizations in the Western world, the French Communist Party...
...Their educations took place in the prestigious state schools...
...Softness triumphs...
...Tapestries and urns, medieval gates and jousting armor, sarcophagi and statuary, and, above all, paintings upon paintings upon paintings...
...In short, they have no practical experience of the tremendous value of the separation of powers, particularly of the separation of political and economic power...
...Among the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century paintings are a few powerful portraits--an earthy study of one of Peter the Great's drinking buddies, for example, and an oddly affecting Catherine the Great seen as a little old lady--but as time passes the proportion of greeting card scenes, cornball illustrations, and dreary landscapes becomes positively oppressive...
...Somewhat quixotically, since he had no large political organization, Mitterrand stepped in and to everyone's astonishment forced de Gaulle into a runoff, finishing with some 45 percent of the votes...
...And a flattering portrait of Chairman Brezhnev...
...It is unquestionably the greatest museum in the United States and quite possibly the greatest museum in the world...
...With its magnificent da.~sic facade, dozens of intimidating entry stairs, and fountained plaza the length of a football field, the museum is surely one of the most impressive structure~ in a city full of impressive structures...
...for either Chirac really is a fascist, willing to overthrow the Republic to block his enemies, or he is merely a "fascist," anything the left is prejudiced against...
...Although he is a mighty, bombastic, colorful, extremely energetic campaigner, this is not entirely hyperbole...
...he was committed to decolonization, for example, before they were...
Vol. 10 • June 1977 • No. 9
