POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE Letter from Paris: A Major Defeat for the French Left
Bloch-Michel, Jean
PiERRE MENDEs-FRANCE was beaten at Grenoble by the former Gaullist minister JeanMarcel Jeanneney. Out of an electorate of about 40,000, Jeanneney's plurality was 130. In beginning with such...
...After all, one general, or a group of generals and colonels, represents the flag better than a party of the Left...
...From now on, the French Left must formulate in a new way the problems which society poses and which the revolution of May 1968 had the merit of boldly exposing...
...But the Right has no need of imagination...
...Hence the winners argue that the workers voted Gaullist because they had been made to strike against their will...
...It must not be forgotten that the female vote is in the majority in France-13 million women voters as against 11 million men...
...It has long since abandoned its internationalism: in one of his campaign speeches, M. Waldek Rochet reminded his listeners that the Communist party was strongly attached to the French flag...
...I am not saying that their presence on the side of the insurgents would have bettered their electoral chances...
...In the aftermath of the days of May, the government will have to try to win over to its side a part of the revolutionary spirit...
...As FOR the non-Communist Left, it seems that the institution of the welfare state has somehow paralyzed them...
...Editor: Your translator (page 291, July–August DISSENT) makes it appear as if Daniel CohnBendit "injured" a cabinet minister last De cember by some kind of bodily assault...
...One of the first, and seemingly most surprising, characteristics of these elections is that the Gaullists won in the regions where the strike was particularly severe...
...A reaction against the insurrection of May and June...
...In one case as in the other, they would have been voting for the established order...
...It represents power, force, the state, order...
...But that does not explain everything...
...The European Left, in its traditional parliamentary form, is on the way to disappearing...
...This fact can only be explained by one of the characteristics of the French Communist electorate, a characteristic, in some sense psychological, which everyone had suspected and which has now become clear: the Communist electorate is not Communist...
...No doubt...
...The student revolt, the violent strikes, the demands for "student power" and "worker power" had taken the Left as much by surprise as the Right...
...During the riots, Cohn-Bendit said that politics are made in the streets...
...It is not easy to predict what the Gaullists will do with this parliamentary majority, because one does not yet know what resistance they will run up against...
...But it is not impossible that one of the causes of the riots might be that they expressed a will for changes of a kind that no party of the Left tried to conceive of...
...Neither the Communist party nor the CGT are in favor of structural reforms conceived and effected within a system that remains capitalist...
...It is hardly likely that the government will accept open discussions with the students, and it is possible that the organizations which more or less represent the students will refuse such discussions, if they are offered to them...
...But it is not enough to limit analysis to this assertion...
...It was this phenomenon that gave the Gaullists a majority in parliament proportionally much greater than that which they have in the country...
...Greater unemployment, a shaky economic and financial situation, students in constant turmoil will oblige the Gaullists to choose between reform and repression, or at least—and most probably—to steer between the one and the other...
...And it is said that from now on they will have it almost everywhere in France...
...It is not even necessary to discuss the role that small businessmen can play, hostile as they clearly are to serious change...
...But they do have a majority in the country...
...The once-strong Socialist positions in the mining country—in the Departments of the North—also have been largely broken up...
...And since they never had any intention of putting them in power, the Communist voters simply passed over to the Right...
...Translated by BEATRICE HOFSTADTER Insulted But Not Injured...
...They voted Gaullist as much when the Left candidate was a full-fledged Communist as when he was a Federation candidate who was merely allied with the Communists...
...The reopening of the universities will be difficult...
...On the other hand, it seems certain that from now on, Gaullisni will have neither the same appearance nor the same possibilities it formerly had...
...The meaning, of course, is that he insulted the minister (he probably deserved it, too...
...But that is not at all certain...
...But it seems incapable of presenting any analysis of the whole society, or of problems of the future, In sum, while the Left paid for its incapacity in the elections, it had given proof of it in the course of the days of riot...
...Pushing him into the dry swimming pool referred to...
...But this time they were persuaded that their votes were needed to prevent the Communists from coming to power...
...But that was only possible because of the bankruptcy of the Left...
...And, in the run-off elections, it often happened that the single Left candidate, whether he belonged to the Federation of the Democratic and Socialist Left or to the Communist party, did not get all the votes that had been given, the first time round, to the several candidates of the Left...
...Chauvinism for chauvinism, why choose the Communist one...
...But the second obstacle will be still more serious: it is that Gaullism only envisions reforms that are bestowed from above, not the sort arrived at by free discussion...
...To come back to what, for many, seems most serious in the present situation: it is clear that the risks of a progressive deterioration in the political situation are very great, if the French Left does not make an enormous effort at reassessment and rejuvenation...
...If it is a question of conservatism, that of the true conservatives is much, much better...
...Besides, I know some people who have tranquilly told me that they voted Gaullist, but that they would not have hesitated to vote Communist if it had been necessary to do so to defeat a candidate of the non-Communist Left...
...On the other hand, a Left without imagination, remaining attached to political formulas which date from the last century, incapable of suspecting that demands can change not only their form but their content--that Left is doomed...
...France was afraid, and the Right did everything to make use of that fear...
...But they cannot win it over without taking away its revolutionary character...
...Stanley Plastrik...
...But the defeat of Mendes-France underlines the long-known fact of the French system's particular sensitivity to minor shifts in the electorate...
...Communist losses were serious...
...Heavens, no...
...The old citadels of the Left and Center—the southeast and the southwest—have given way...
...When they vote for CP candidates, they vote "against the bosses," the regime, the Right...
...It was not the strikers who disavowed the strikes, but probably their wives...
...These voters are being perfectly consistent...
...On the electoral level the Left has not known so bitter a defeat since the "Blue Horizon" Chamber of 1919...
...One asks of the Right, on the contrary, that it have none...
...The delays in the achievement of `la force de frappe," the impossibility of continuing to lead the underdeveloped countries of the old empire by means of a politics of assistance, because it costs too much, and finally, a loss of prestige owing to the simple fact that Gaullism has been so violently contested, will inevitably modify both its role and its image in France...
...If things are done this way, whatever reforms are made will never inspire confidence in those with whom they ought to have been discussed...
...Because, at bottom, the Left is asking itself if there is still anything more to ask for, it clings to the most backward sectors of the society and the least favored categories of workers...
...And the old Right will respond to it in ways that are not difficult to imagine...
...The Communist party is on the side of order and legality, it does not wish to discuss structural reforms— and keeps putting off, to a greater and greater distance, the day when it will take power...
...That means that there will be reforms at the university, but there is no way of knowing what form or what dimensions those reforms will have...
...Was the Right surprised as well...
...The most important fact that was brought out, last June 23 and June 30, was not so much that a certain percentage of votes from the Center, the Left, and even in certain circumstances from the far Left moved toward Gaullism, but that this movement took place everywhere in the same proportions...
...But, here also, the government will run up against a double obstacle...
...In beginning with such an example, I do not wish to pretend that all the Gaullist gains were produced by such feeble margins...
...Cohn-Bendit, whatever his politics, is too nice a chap to attack any one violently...
...Departments like Vaucluse, which had never sent anyone to the Chamber except Radicals, Socialists, and Communists, are represented there today by Gaul lists...
...This is true as much in domestic politics, where it will have to tackle a continuously explosive situation, as in foreign policy, where it can no longer play its former role...
...As for the great outburst of democratic demands which call for new forms often at odds with those of parliamentary democracy, Gaullist plans for "participation" try to respond to them...
...The Communist party has changed neither its program, its vocabulary, nor its personnel for 20 years...
...That is correct—if and when no one can make politics elsewhere...
...And if the Right was present at the riots, in the forces of order who wielded the bludgeons and the tear-gas bombs, the classic Left, that of the parties and the parliament, was completely absent...
...There is nothing unjust about the fact that in this situation the Left lost...
...In fact, aside from its POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE opposition to the "regime of personal power," the Left no Ionger originates anything in France, exactly as it no longer originates anything in Germany and England...
...The first is its own POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE following, which did not vote for reform but on the contrary for order and things as they are...
...To a society that offers most people not only access to material goods, but also greater and greater security and increasing possibilities of embourgeoisement, the Left looks like a spoiled child complaining because he has nothing more to ask for...
...Besides, the reformers are themselves divided...
...And it is enough that it is what it is...
...One must look further...
...If it succeeds in nothing else, the new Left which has just revealed itself will continue to "make politics in the streets...
...And it is highly probable that, where the strike was severe, women, who had up to then voted like their husbands, now voted in some sense against them...
...So much so that the rightward trend in France, now evident for more than 10 years, has arisen out of social causes (the increased income and embourgeoisement of a larger and larger part of the population) and purely political ones (the resignation of the Left before new problems for which they not only had no solutions but which they were often incapable even of formulating...
Vol. 15 • September 1968 • No. 5
