Will the Kremlin Win the French Elections?

...A third is that they are simply doing what their bosses in Moscow are telling them to do...

...thus the likely thing is that most of them missed, as I did, "The New Bill of Sexual Rights and Responsibilities" when it appeared in the Humanist early in 1976...

...instead, "it looks on tempests and is never shaken...

...Meanwhile, the President has all but directly invited M. Mitterrand to join him in governing France from the left of center...

...Every time in the past that the PCF has gone "liberal," it has reached a point when suddenly it retreated into hard revolutionary intransigence, and this point has always been just about the time when French voters appeared willing to trust a pluralistic left to lead their country gradually toward social democracy...

...There appears to be no more stability in this "New Bill" than there is in Cosmopolitan, or in Playboy or Hustler, for that matter...

...Giscard d'Estaing and Chirac, and is particularly annoying to the latter, since it prevents them from going into the election as advantageously as he thinks they might...

...A majority of Socialist voters agree with him, and forced their party leaders to keep their distance from the Communist Party...

...With the French political fever rising, the Prime Minister, Raymond Barre, is at last taking full cognizance of his duties as political leader—as well as leader of the government—and is sallying forth with a lengthy reforming program (offered at Blois in mid-January), a document so radical that it proposes to give the French people the right of habeus corpus...

...Perhaps most interesting, however, is the idea that the 500,000 Communist militants, rather than a handful of Politburo bosses, are the ones responsible for this astounding reversal of policy...

...He wants reflationary economic policies and the tricolor held high...

...and the American view that the China-Taiwan question should be settled peacefully...

...Lovers traditionally have not only tended to agree L with old-fashioned metaphysicians and theologians that love makes the world go round, but to feel (such is their passionate fallacy) that their particular love is responsible for the larger cosmic harmonies...

...Relations with the Kremlin grew very chilly during the French comrades' awkward "Eurocommunist" phase, and now that they are behaving like themselves again they are once again receiving invitations to spend the weekend in Moscow...

...If we are to judge the validity of our commitments on the basis of presumed public opinion in a completely abstract situation—in the absence of any incident or clearly perceived threat—no American commitments will seem credible...

...It is clear enough that in recent years Malory's stability has been identified by many as a prescription for an erotic straitjacket, desirable only insofar as it increases by one the number of available options...

...Their mission is to get all the power and to solve all the problems...

...In fact, it was so honored in a Cosmopolitan article, "Love Is Back In Town" by Walter Meade, that recommends the old-fashioned kind of exclusive commitment to those who are up to John P. Sisk is professor of English at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington...

...The latter is expected soon to appeal to the "majority" to close ranks behind him, accepting M. Barre's political leadership at least for the duration of the campaign...

...He insists with all the energy of a man who knows he is cuckolded but cannot bring himself to admit it that the left can never rule without the PCF, whose practices must be tolerated patiently until it evolves toward democracy...

...In some circles it is now being asserted that our commitments to Taiwan are not meaningful because the American people would not support involvement in any war to defend Taiwan...

...French pols, as a matter of fact, have had a tic about legitimacy since 1789, which is not surprising...

...Roger Kaplan Will the Kremlin Win the French Elections...

...commitments and intentions could lead to conflict...

...To do this, the Socialist leader would have to ditch his CERES comrades, who control between one-fifth and one-third of the party...

...Unfortunately, this risk could arise...

...Peking also insists that it has made no commitments to a peaceful settlement, and intends to make none, viewing Taiwan as strictly an internal affair...

...And M. Chirac's fighting strategy deserves credit, too...

...But if the current situation is altered only slightly, whether to M. Mitterrand's advantage or not, it is a safe bet that the country will continue along its frustrated and frustrating course...

...M. Marchais prefers to keep his grip on this state within a state than to do something that might break its discipline...

...Yet in the event of crisis, public and official reaction may be quite different...

...The pity is that M. Mitterrand staked his career on the Common Program and the politics it implied: alliance with the Marxist-Leninist left and its 20 percent of the vote, and, concurrently, assistance in its search for respectability as a democratic party...

...The latter is a serious publication whose editors surely dwell light years away from the anti-hoarding universe of Helen Gurley Brown...

...unions are harassing the country with short strikes to warn it of what may happen if the election does not go their way...

...Thus Sir Thomas Malory, writing in the fag end of the Middle Ages with the great time of King Arthur already legendary leagues behind him, begins his "Knight of the Cart" with the regret that "in many persons there is no stability...

...Today, the PRC leaders insist that via the Shanghai Communique, the United States has committed itself to the eventual recognition of the People's Republic of China and the abandonment of Taiwan...

...Only a miscalculation of U.S...

...True love, "the marriage of true minds," as Shakespeare puts it in his great one-hundred and sixteenth sonnet, "alters not when it alteration finds...

...A variety of explanations have been offered as to why the Communists seem to be trying to skewer an easy election victory...

...Meanwhile the Communist leader, Georges Marchais, calls the president of the French equivalent of the National Association of Manufacturers (le Patronat) a murderer because there are some families which cannot afford meat every night...

...As long as M. Mitterrand was held in the Communist alliance by the bullying of his left wing and his own crypto-Marxist phantasmagoria, M. Chirac's argument appeared sound...

...threatens serious social conflict, no matter who wins, if major changes in the economy are not made...

...One might have expected in them the respect for the past, and therefore for the old love, that characterized the original humanists...

...What the militants cannot accept, in such a situation, is that their party would then become just like any other party, going openly into the market of political ideas, sharing power, losing power, proposing partial solutions to ephemeral problems...

...However, M. Mitterrand continues to affirm he will govern France under no condition but alone or with his erstwhile allies...

...10 The American Spectator March 1978 The Communist-led C.G.T...

...The latter has been sniping at the President with a great deal of energy, though with none of the viciousness that the Communists have applied to M. Mitterrand...

...But then one does not hope to find Malory's "old love" in the swinging world of Cosmopolitan, where men and women together expect to be "soon hot, soon cold" since the alternative is to be soon bored...

...One is that they simply do not want to share power with the Socialists, certainly not as junior partners...

...and that France can avoid vassalage to American multinationals only by nationalizing its economy into collectivism, which is exactly what the PCF insists the Socialists must agree to as a condition for renewed cooperation...

...Nowadays, he says, "men cannot love seven nights but that they must have all their desires" and their love is "soon hot, soon cold...

...The United States thus appears today to be on the defensive, uncertain of its basic principles, and hence, unpredictable...

...The Chinese were silent on the question of peaceful settlement...

...And Francois Mitterrand intones about the just society...

...If the communique had stated that the two governments on both sides of the straits so viewed the matter, that would merely have been a statement of fact...

...King takes into account the "ambience of freedom and autonomy that's, frankly, conducive to the casual adventure, provided one is not so hung up on guilt, so compulsive a hoarder, that she instinctively cheats herself out of a perfectly marvellous experience...

...The whole burden of M. Giscard d'Estaing's strategy, on the contrary, has been that the times have changed and now there is something there: and he is it...

...nevertheless, for those determined to fulfill their needs a place and a way can be found...

...Since such a conflict would also antagonize the Japanese, who by that time may be playing a much larger role in China's economic development, it would be the height of folly...

...but it does not appear that he will personally enter the fray...

...Another is that they foresee a period of economic stagnation no matter who is in power and want no part of the responsibility (hence their attacks on the Socialists as wanting to "manage the capitalist crisis" rather than "change society...

...If China's developmental problems remain as formidable, and its relations with the Soviet Union as complex, as they are today, it will not be prone to risk war with a nation that for the conceivable future will be vastly superior to it in military and economic terms...

...It should be noted that Sir Thomas, having made the wrong political choices, was probably in jail when he wrote this, hence inclined to pessimism, and that his story featured that fated adulterous pair, Lancelot and Guinevere...

...Polls show that as many as 55 percent of the voters still prefer the left...

...Business itself, however, remains sluggish, and little investment can be expected in the present climate of uncertainty, exacerbated by the recent emergence of Baader-Meinhof-style terror gangs...

...In my view, this is a misreading of both the past and the future...

...Two positions were set forth there: the Chinese view that there is but one China, and that this one China includes Taiwan...

...Indeed, it tends to reinforce the sexual ethic of such publications, and for this reason alone deserves close attention...

...Paul had said pretty much the same thing to the Corinthians: "There is nothing love cannot face...

...It certainly would be, as would the original agreement of 1972 which the Communists signed enthusiastically...

...The Socialist Party of Francois Mitterrand and the Movement of Left Radicals of Robert Fabre walked out of a meeting in late September claiming the Communists were asking for too much...

...But with even the Socialist left wing (the CERES group) crying foul at the Communists' naked power grab, the center is acquiring an attraction for many which it did not have before, and there is little doubt that M. Chirac would be well advised to go into the battle as a friendly rival, not an adversary, of the President...

...Ambiguity is not invariably a mistake, but neither is it necessarily helpful in producing and maintaining an understanding...

...With this slogan, the divided left is sending its candidates into the battle to see who controls the next French National Assembly...

...The ruling conviction of the "New Bill" is that "the boundaries of human sexuality need to be expanded" in the full realization that "until now our bodies have been in bondage to church and The American Spectator March 1978 11...

...Obviously, the PCF is hoping that the Socialists will not win alone and the disillusioned leftist voters will (next time) return to it so that (the time after that) it may ride into power unburdened by allies with liberal scruples...

...In 1789, the Royalists sat on the right, the Republicans on the left...

...The United States meets this clarity with continued ambiguity, exploring privately the possibility of some compromise...

...Mitterrand and Fabre claimed it would be inflationary and communistic...

...there is no limit to its faith, its hope, and its endurance...

...Such expectations would have been badly wide of the mark...

...But there were better times long ago, "when the old love was not so, for men and women could love together seven years, and no lecherous lust was betwixt them, and then was love truth and faithfulness...

...For that matter, now that Comrade Marchais has reneged on the electoral agreement that went with the Common Program, nothing is to keep candidates of all three left parties from standing in the second round (provided they get 12.5 percent in the first) and letting a single conservative breeze in with a plurality...

...The reference is to twenty years of Gaullism, and since the Gaullists are not in power, one could say that what the French have really had twenty years too much of is leftist buffoonery instead of responsible opposition...

...M. Chirac has been playing a bold game since he resigned as Prime Minister in August 1976, revived the Gaullist party as the Rassemblement pour la Republique ("Rally for the Republic": the French are always rallying around something or other, and they always end up with a glass of brandy in the café), and set forth to demonstrate that (as Andre Malraux too claimed in the early sixties) there is nothing between the Gaullists and the Communists...

...At this point one may remember Erica Jong' s Isadora Wing and her famous fantasy of unzippered, spontaneous sex with improper strangers, according to which any place is a good place and any way a good way...

...The Communists and Socialists are arguing, in effect, about who may legitimately overturn a constitutional society which, if it is still without habeus corpus, has the active support of most of its citizens...

...Now that the PCF, for its own cryptic (or not so cryptic) reasons, is coming out of the Stalinist closet, which really surprises no one other than the outraged leader of the Socialist Party, M. Mitterrand is finding that his whole strategy is worth as much as an old pissoir, even though the polls show that as many as 55 percent of the voters still prefer the left...

...The major event since March 1977, when the Union de la Roger Kaplan was born in Paris at the outset of the Cold War...

...Much more attuned to the Cosmopolitan ethos, however, was Florence King's article, "Brief Encounters...

...On the contrary, the Communists still see their party in the Leninist tradition, with a rigidly vertical and secret chain of command...

...Long before, St...

...The leader of his extreme left wing (the CERES group), Jean-Pierre Chevenement, raps the PCF on the knuckles but roars against what he calls "the new American left," by which he means those leftists such as the "new philosophers" who are adamantly anti-Communist (cf., the notes on the new philosophy by R. Kaplan in Commentary, February 1978...

...Now, the credibility of this document is marred by a patent falsehood, namely, that "all Chinese on both sides of the straits" accept the one-China thesis...

...Unfortunately, this has led to a resurgence of the worst kind of French chauvinism, anti-American bigotry, etc., and the critical issues in this election—such things as the planned economy, the strengthening and enlarging of the European Community, the nuclear deterrent, the relationship with NATO, the role for France in Africa—have not been discussed as well as one would expect by the people who gave us the Enlightenment, the Napoleonic Code, the metric system, and the new philosophy...

...February 3, 1978 wenty years, enough...

...But both the Chinese and American negotiators knew that the statement putinto the communique was false, since it ignores the large number of Taiwanese and the growing number of mainland Chinese on Taiwan who do not accept this thesis...

...True lovers, like the stoic Marcus Aurelius' wise man, are not whirled about...

...The argument is that ten to 15 years hence, a militarily sufficient PRC will be prepared to risk confrontation with the United States to "liberate" Taiwan...

...It must be said to M. Barre's credit that he has calmly resisted the temptation to any sort of demagogy, patiently explaining his ill-liked economic policies and sternly criticizing employers who have hollered for state aid to avoid going into the red...

...The great enigma of this whole pre-election period has been the behavior of the Communists, who at their party conference in early January accused the Socialists of swerving rightward (that was the nicest thing they said) and invited the populace to look upon the PCF as the only legitimate party of the left...

...John P. Sisk When Love Is Soon Hot, Soon Cold The signers of the "New Bill of Sexual Rights" are as nervous about sexual matters as were our Puritan Fathers, apparently because they fear that in the end liberation will prove to have served no serious purpose—to have added up only to pleasure...

...Nevertheless, his conviction that true love has stability, and by implication, exclusivity, has been a commonplace of our culture, no less fundamental to Dante's Divine Comedy than to the text of Hallmark greeting cards...

...The conservative (in France this means authoritarian and statist, though not collectivist) ideological banner was instead raised by the Gaullist leader Jacques Chirac...

...Unfortunately, it is possible to be so overawed by Cosmopolitan's vital statistics (nearly two million subscribers and God knows how many more actual readers) that one fails to pay sufficient attention to significant correlative developments in less conspicuous publications...

...On March 12 and 19 the French will choose a new National Assembly...

...for the breakup of the leftist Union is due in part to his tireless insistence, on campaign trips all around the country, that Communists in the government means exactly that, Communists in the government...

...Gauche swept the municipal elections, has been its virtual collapse over the issue of nationalization (at least that is the ostensible issue...

...while Edmund Maire, the leader of the main non-Communist union federation (the C.f.d.t...

...Confidence that Communist intransigence may push M. Mitterrand away from the aims he has professed for the past decade—aims which M. Chirac refuses to dismiss as election rhetoric—or that he may not win at all was expressed in a poll of leading businessmen taken by L'Express late last year...

...They always feel vaguely that they are bastards...

...Thus, our new relation with the PRC was launched on the basis of a deliberately ambiguous and partly false set of statements, presumably because it could not be launched on any other basis...

...What could dash its lead is this: Because of France's two-round electoral process, a plurality for the left on March 12 could fail to translate into a The American Spectator March 1978 majority of legislative seats on March 19, if leftist voters refused to cast their ballots for Communist candidates standing for the defunct Union...

...King knows that there are still lots of places in America where a woman "can't easily carry on a full affair without risking gossipy neighbors or even community outrage...

...The United States agreed not to challenge the Chinese position—with the meaning of this commitment unclear...

...They are more likely to read Playboy or Esquire than the Humanist...

...He refused to believe the Union of the Left would last, and did not let his Prime Minister veer from his anti-inflationary economic policies even in the face of growing unemployment...

...The left's travails are a vindication of President Giscard d'Estaing's ,low-key strategy...

...This maneuvering has not done anything to improve relations between MM...

...Even for humanist-intellectuals quantity has a capacity to assert quality...

...Certainly, one might have expected a statement that demonstrated some continuity with that distinguished band of humanists who, as Castiglione represents them in The Courtier, gathered at the court at Urbino early in the sixteenth century to talk about love and related matters...

...The inconstancy of lovers has therefore been a handy symbol for writers who wish to convey their sense that the times are bad times, or that the center of things is coming unglued...

...Perhaps this election will be most interesting for the emergence of a strong center...

...But with the recent breakdown of the Communist-Socialist alliance, this election could prove most interesting for the emergence of a strong center...

...or if they are quite literally whirled about, as Paolo and Francesca are in the third circle of Dante's hell, they still remain constant...

...And the danger of miscalculation provides a powerful argument against an ambiguous policy towards Taiwan—since our involvement in both the Korean and Vietnam wars was to a large extent the product of Communist miscalculation, for which we bore considerable responsibility...

...Indeed, the PCF had demanded that the "Common Program of Government" be updated...

...Consider, for a moment, the.Shanghai Communique, that joint declaration signed at the end of the Nixon visit in August 1972...

...The juggling for position in this campaign strongly suggeststhat the French, with their common-sensical habits and their vicious little bigotries, are a resolutely centrist nation, and that only the accidents of their history and the dogmas of their collective mythology place so many of them at so alarming a distance from the center...