Gaullism And The "Machiavellian Left"

...Policies Without Ideology This attitude is not without a certain unexpected Machiavellian touch...

...Strictly on the political level all the parties of the left have compromised themselves with the politics of the right...

...To the extent that in 1958 the nation at least implicitly repudiated the Fourth Republic, de Gaulle's famous declaration of May 13, 1958 met with widespread political approval...

...The heavy test which both are undergoing today is no different from that of the entire western world, subjected to the two great revolutions of the 20th century: (1) political decolonization, (2) economic and social modernization...

...They did not undergo the Moscow trials, that great traumatic experience for the left...

...There were, of course, in the beginning OAS "blackfeet" in France who showed in sufficiently violent ways the nasty habits they had picked up...

...The kind of research done by an organization such as the Jean Moulin Club on democratic planification, the influence it tries to exert through its publications or direct pressure by its members on the state administration is characteristic...

...The second condition is that the present regime must last long enough for the new aspirants to be ready and the old, if not vanished entirely, at least to be forgotten...

...Perhaps Sartre is murmuring to himself these days that phrase of a hero of Tolstoy which Leon Blum used to say never stopped haunting his political life: "Everything was so strange, so different from what he had imagined it would be...

...What characterizes this new form of political activity is that it takes place not only outside of but against the political parties...

...Since they put no faith in ideologies, the most serious of these younger people devote themselves to a kind of political and economic "expertise" which they regard as free from traditional labels...

...The rout of the Sartrian left, which tried to be radical, is no greater than the rout of the traditional left which had joined with the government...

...Decline of the Left In such a situation, the role of the French left is extremely difficult...

...Their mistrust of these parties and their disgust with parliamentary democracy as they had seen it operate before 1958, were such that they preferred almost anything to a return of the Fourth Republic...

...On the other hand, the stand he took during the Algerian war appears today to have been completely inconsistent...

...On February 15,1963 the arrest of several army officers and their accomplices aborted a new attempt on the life of General de Gaulle...

...But two conditions are necessary if things are to go as they wish...

...Now they are scattered...

...He was an unconditional supporter of the Algerian FLN, but at the same time he hoped for a long time that the FLN, thanks to its war against France, would be a kind of auxiliary revolutionary force, capable of replacing a faltering because satisfied French working class...

...But the very instability of the political life which they did see unfold before their immature eyes has, so to say, immunized them to every sort of political illusion...

...Mistrust of the traditional parties, and in particular of the Socialist party, is such that many young voters whose activities and views would ordinarily classify them as of the left, voted "yes" in de Gaulle's last constitutional referendum...

...so for Sartre it is tainted by neo-colonialism...

...But, contrary to what went on before 1940, this action never seriously impinges upon the social structure or threatens the forms of property...

...have been dragged into political action by the only event they have ever known which touched them directly: the Algerian war...

...Children born after the war have become young students, workers and farmers...

...All in all, these 850,000 Algerian French thrust back on the metropolis, these men and women whose despair not even the French, let alone foreigners, can gauge, are extraordinarily discreet...

...The Algerian revolution cannot succeed without French credits and assistance...

...As for efforts to establish a new left separate from the Socialist party and independent of the Communist party, the attempt of the PSU (Unified Socialist party) has demonstrated the futility of that...

...Most of all they believed that a negative vote would be interpreted in the country as a vote of confidence in the traditional parties which had united in a strange "cartel of the no's...

...This does not mean that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds...

...The fact that the FLN for quite understandable reasons is forming closer ties with the present French government (as it would do with any receptive French government), takes on an aspect of betrayal in the eyes of Sartre...

...they don't even ask for co-management...

...The unions in particular are careful not to demand co-ownership of the means of production...

...It does mean that in France, as throughout the western world, the lot of the worker is in no way comparable to what it was fifty years ago: collective bargaining, leisure time, social security, retirement benefits and public education have perhaps altered the situation less than full employment and the transformation of production techniques...

...But it is certain that there will be no popular uprising...

...Their presence at the head of the country would be an insuperable obstacle, blocking the new technicians from access to responsible posts...

...These new modes of political life are ambiguous: both reassuring and disturbing...

...This movement of what I call here the "Machiavellian left" is doubtless the liveliest in France today...

...First, because they have lost their platforms...

...Go back to the remotest period of French history...

...But they attacked service stations and cashiers a good deal more often than police stations and gendarmes...

...He has once more become the target of violent attacks on the part of Communist party intellectuals...

...Only to the extent that a new left will know how to draw fresh conclusions from these revolutionary phenomena and to do so without sacrificing either the need for effectiveness to ideology, or principles to efficiency, can it recover the influence it once had in France...

...These young technicians find the present regime to their liking because it is vacuous...

...De Gaulle is neither Hitler nor Mussolini...

...But politics without any ideology at all—that is, a politics of efficiency for its own sake—can lead to anything, to fascism as easily as to the "new democracy" everyone claims to favor today...

...They come to hear the old familiar jokes of their country served with the proper accent, and to weep...

...They know virtually nothing of the great leftist battles through which their parents lived: the Popular Front, the Spanish Civil War, the Resistance movement...

...The traditional parties of the left fully realize they have lost the greater part of their influence...

...In any event, these young political newcomers have placed those traditional leftists who claimed to be the intellectual guides of the new generation in a painful position...

...They did so because they were completely unconvinced by the arguments of the classical left against de Gaulle (the dangers of personal power, distrust of rule by force, the defense of traditional democracy...

...In a few years a word of "pataouete" overheard on some street corner, suddenly revealing that the speaker was born on the other side of the Mediterranean, will surprise us...

...Some of us have friends among them who, coming from Algiers, Oran or Constantine, look for any kind of work in France, any sort of housing and with courage accept whatever is offered them...

...Hence, everything rests upon the person of the general himself...

...Whatever the secret or avowed tendencies of the present regime and its supporters, whatever aversion leftist intellectuals may have toward the regime, it is obviously not at all a matter of fascism...

...Once he is eliminated, the young Machiavellians of the left (if so they can be called) count upon power falling into their hands...

...translated by LISA Guss...

...If electoral laws had allowed, this label stuck on a sack of meal would have been enough to win...

...It was a Socialist-led government and, for several years, a Socialist minister, Robert Lacoste (still a member in good standing of the Socialist party) which led the Algerian war and which initiated or authorized the most revolting practices...

...And what is more, this situation, apparently so precarious, has little bearing on the general state of mind in the country...

...This is why the Evian agreement bringing peace to Algeria came as a great disappointment to him...

...For their objective would not be to sweep into political activity a portion of the people, but simply to remove the men now in power and replace them with others, on the assumption that the country would soon fall into line, as it did after de Gaulle's coup...

...What is certain is that de Gaulle's regime has brought to France an unprecedented duality: a calm and contented people, by and large uninterested in political affairs, and several hundred conspirators ready to take any risk and determined to destroy the man who rules the country...

...Miserable Though We Are" These conspirators are not even supported by the nearly 850,000 "blackfeet" (the name given to French and Europeans born in Algeria...

...Its leadership came to power because its principal political claim was that it had none...

...Evian ended his hopes of revolution through the FLN...

...Whether this calculation is accurate, only time can tell...

...We have had governments in the past that were repeatedly assaulted by popular forces which did not, however, threaten the ruler himself...

...While the Communist party has suffered least of all from these events, it has yet to recover from the effects of the 20th Party Congress, and it is one of the few parties to have drawn no lessons from Khrushchev's revelations...

...And the Communist party repeatedly voted plenary powers to these governments, thus authorizing them to carry out those practices in Algeria that have by now become familiar to us...

...This heterogeneous grouping, one of whose leaders Pierre MendesFrance withdrew almost as soon as he joined, has just been rendered sterile at its last congress by some seven opposing factions, while the only publication it possesses—France-Observateur— spends its time each week publicizing the polemics waged between Gilles Martinet and Claude Bourdet, each of whom represents one of the opposing factions within the PSU...

...Salan and Argoud, however, might very well be Franco or Salazar...

...We were told often enough that if Algeria were let go, the "blackfeet" would come and offer us an on-the-spot demonstration of what a fascist population is like, transplanting with them to metropolitan France the customs of the OAS...

...With this ended, they face the same political void their elders do—except that it leaves them unconcerned...

...In any case, they no longer attract attention...

...Not a single candidate standing openly for a French Algeria won in the last election...

...In addition to political and economic reasons, the decline of the French left is due to demographic reasons...

...Nor has there ever been in France a regime so threatened in the person of its leader, yet enjoying so much continuity and staying-power...

...Nothing is more curious in this respect than the solitude a man like JeanPaul Sartre suddenly finds himself in...

...it has displaced all traditional notions about politics in the sense that it no longer seeked to form an opposition party but a party of succession...

...But the great working class victories of 1936 and then the sweeping social reforms of 1945 drained the substance out of the greater part of leftist demands...

...Every evening those living in Paris occupy a few rows of seats in a tiny Montmartre theatre to hear several "chansonniers" from their country in a revue called "puree de nous z6tres," roughly translatable as "miserable though we are...

...Gaullism has no political or intellectual staff...

...Today the situation is exactly the opposite...

...the eighth such attempt since he took power on May 14, 1958...

...For a few months the refugees congregated on the outskirts of Marseille because it was warm there and they could drink anisette at sidewalk cafes...

...That politics should rid itself of anachronistic ideologies is all to the good...

...Hitler, Stalinism, even the Hungarian events are hardly remembered...

...While even a year ago it was possible to take seriously the periodic appeals of certain intellectuals, calling upon the left to unite against the fascist danger, today such an appeal has no resonance...

...From their founding days until just after the Second World War, they lived not off the myth but the real exploitation of man by capitalist forces...

...The old parties which still have, if not militants, at least some active and competent people, must not be allowed to return to the political scene...

...Not one deputy of the Gaullist UNR was elected because of who he was or what he had done, but only because of his party label...

...you will find no statesman whose existence has been the object of such precise and repeated threats...

...With the OAS threat thus transformed from a political problem into a police matter, the attitude of the left in France is necessarily modified...

...For several years they, in their own organizations (French Students' Union, Young Farmers, etc...

...He relied upon the FLN to bring about the downfall of Gaullism...

...Their declaration would thus have a Latin American flavor, and their action would at most be a putsch...

...The various schemes on which he had built his political action these past years have vanished: between Gaullism and fascism no identity can be established, there is no longer a fascist political danger represented by the OAS, France is at peace, a peace brought about by de Gaulle...

...Fascism, at least this brand of fascism, shall "not pass" (to use the old Popular Front slogan) not because its road has been barred but because it simply does not exist...

...I even know of several leaders of the PSU who, while officially fighting for a "no" vote, actually voted "yes...

...Why is this so...

...In a sense this was how the voters showed their indifference to the Algerian question...

...All those compromised by sup port from the extreme right were swept away...

...Workers' action is now limited to demands for salary adjust ments in order to meet higher living costs or to increase the share going to the workers...

...By contrast, whatever declaration de Gaulle's possible assassins are preparing would win the support of only a minute group of rePARIS bellious officers and nostalgic fascists...

...The same is true for a whole series of quiet yet powerful organizations such as the UNEF (Na tional Union of French Students), the Young Farmers and the Young Business Executives...

...The formidable birthrate of the nation since the Second World War is now making itself felt in politics...

...No one can be sure that the head of the state will not be the object of an attempt tomorrow, and this time a successful one...