MITTERRAND CONFRONTS THE INTELLECTUALS

...These tendencies have by no means triumphed within the Socialist world whose character crystallized in 1971 at the Congres d'Epinay, at a time when the context of French intellectual debates had not yet changed...

...The Socialists have refused to admit private interests and have merely licensed local radio within the state monopoly, without advertising—and local voices are still regulated from above...

...Les Formes de l'histoire: essai d'anthropologie politique (Paris, 1978...

...The voice of the intellectual/ social scientist has never been stronger in France...

...America FRANCE'S INTELLECTUAL OPENING-UP toward America has been less to a country than to a frame of mind that emphasizes individualism, freedom, personal risk, and dynamic tension, in contrast to that of the French left, which has always sought to control, unify, organize, protect, and to legislate...

...Images do not lie...

...La Classe ininterrompue: cahiers de la famille Sandre enseignants 1780-1960 (Paris, 1979...

...467...

...The French Socialist party, rebuilt on the 100th anniversary of the Paris Commune, willfully attached itself to all the myths of France's left-wing national tradition, to prove that it was clearly a gauche, and not adrift in the murky waters of social democracy...

...These two "siblings" coexisted peacefully in the 1970s, because the right was in power and there were numerous contacts between them...

...When B.H...

...French historians and intellectuals, however, emphasize instead just how deep collaboration ran and to what a degree anti-Semitism was a constant in French life.' Socialists see the past as a vast struggle between good and evil...

...For the Socialists, culture is life itself and humanism must replace technocracy's hold over la douce France...

...As for the reconsideration of the French past, one can only say that political movements are seldom built on a critical analysis of their own history...

...French intellectual life now is defined less by a series of academic disciplines than by a set of key cultural loci where historians, philosophers, and social scientists alike express their ideas...

...They have stressed the weight of American cultural imperialism, all the more odious because it is based on materialism, which is the bane of a left with deeply ingrained Catholic roots...

...Under their analytical scalpels, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic period, and above all the Restoration have been dissected to reveal the ultimately nonpluralist, antilibertarian, and totalitarian nature of the very concept of "revolution...

...In the late 1960s French intellectuals were mostly interested in American radicalism, whose protest against the Vietnam war and racism confirmed French left-wing prejudices against the U.S...

...For Mitterrand, France is the sum of its longhallowed past in which kings mingle with revolutionaries and le peuple to form a unique blend of national glory whose last chapter, the resistance, takes on echoes of Valmy in the Socialist memory...

...France's contemporary historians prefer the role of anthropologists delving into their own culture to that of high priests exorcising or celebrating it.' Their historical work is not hostile to the political left, but it is the product of a completely different mental set, which refuses to link present-day politics to the past as history...

...The debate over a closed, "hexagonal" (France's shape) vs...

...Mitterrand has already appointed a popular historian, Claude Manceron, to prepare the bicentennial of the French Revolution, which will begin in 1984...

...It was more or less buried by de Gaulle, who managed to bridge the alternatives by pushing the country toward modernization while also pursuing the theme of grandeur...

...Watergate proved to be a crucial turning point in this context, for it was the established nonradical American press that undid a president—thanks to its total political independence...

...This dark, negative current has been tremendously popular in the past decade whether through such films as The Sorrow and the Pity, Lacombe Lucien, Un sac de billes, or through the major impact of Robert Paxton's work...

...In 1971 America meant Vietnam, Kent State, racial violence, and a pervasive imperialism...

...They have broken the cultural synthesis that made Sartre and de Gaulle effectively two sides of the same coin of national prestige, and acknowledged that France's universal civilisation has now turned into little more than threadbare insularity...

...The Socialist victory has reopened the debate by resurrecting a vision of a France whose strength emanates from its historic and cultural specificity...

...Sociologically the "Ancients" are represented by those left-wing teachers, instituteurs, provincial intellectual notables, and academic trade unionists who have formed the backbone of the Socialist party and who, now newly elected to the National Assembly, have recreated the republique des professeurs, complete with beards and militant lay historical references...

...But then, under Pompidou, and especially under Giscard, the references to Paris France's mission dwindled, and the country went about the serious task of competing in an increasingly complex international setting, with only the most advanced economic peers (the U.S.A., Germany, and Japan) as models...

...French intellectuals, however, have their eyes riveted on the East European countries' victims of the Soviet regime, because they view the struggles that have taken place there, especially in Poland, as crucially important to the search for possible alternatives to state dictatorships in a Marxist context...

...Their rhetoric is deeply alienating to intellectuals and opinion leaders who look askance at Socialist cultural jingoism...

...But now they condemn the Gulag as a Soviet crime against human rights, much as they condemn repression in Latin America, South African apartheid, or the sexual mutilations of women in Africa...

...Consider now the three key issues of America, the Soviet Union, and France itself...

...A new version of the quarrel between the "Ancients" and the "Moderns" is in the making...

...Todd's book is the first to come to grips "negatively" and intimately with Sartre...

...The heirs of Hugo, Zola, Malraux, and Sartre have lost faith in the universal implications of French culture, in the role of the intellectual as sacred harbinger of truth, and, most important, in the mystical value of the left—the three essential credos of intellectual life in France since at least the Dreyfus Affair...

...Deep inside, French Socialists have felt that the use of the Gulag could only be a rightist ploy...

...The Soviet menace, in the view of French intellectuals, is infinitely greater than the "open" misdeeds of the U.S., because it has thrived, they argue, on a series of instances of silence and self-censorship on the part of the West vis-à-vis the entire revolutionary mystique...

...Liberation, September 16, 1981...

...Claude Lefort, Un homme en trop: reflexion sur l'Archipel du Goulag (Paris, 1976...

...Socialists wish to stress the heroic and generous role of the resistants and their popular roots and have once more made May 8, the anniversary of the end of World War II and of Joan of Arc also, a national holiday (after Giscard had dropped it...

...Throwing the Gulag into French internal 465 politics could only provoke a rift in the name of an anticommunism based on "external," Soviet conditions that are not relevant to the French left...

...Gradually, however, French intellectual "Moderns" began to appreciate the very mechanisms of American society: its pluralism, its competitive mentality, its pragmatism, even when they were manifest in such nonradical "mainstream" activities as government, business, scholarship, and journalism...

...Vichy France is a case in point...

...Dynamism now was a Protestant work ethic and no longer a form of political virtue...

...The showdown is taking place around three tendencies that reshaped French intellectual life in the 1970s: the opening to the West and a growing interest in American society and culture...

...France is at a crossroad between two alternative cultures...

...Both, of course, condemn all infractions against human rights, wherever they occur...

...But does this tranquil France exist, after 20 years of major structural economic and social changes have led Paris and the provinces down the uncertain road of modernity, with all its irreverence and international comparisons...

...The Socialists have idealized le peuple, turning it once again into a major collective actor, while French historians are more interested in its sociological diversity...

...Ideological argument has given way to an open, nonacademic, antitotalitarian cultural milieu where the principal vocation is to demystify...

...It is no accident that the first major clash between the "Ancients" and the "Moderns" should have taken place in the audiovisual realm, the one most influenced by acute "Americanitis...

...and the questioning of France's cultural centrality, expressed in the deliberate demystification of the national past...

...It raged in the postwar period, particularly in the economic realm...

...Le génie cr'eateur has given way to the intellocrate.7 It is unlikely that those who have really relativized their status once again will be willing to espouse the role of the engaged militant a la Sartre, a role that the Socialists continue to revere from afar...

...The two worlds of 1968 are steadily drifting apart...

...The newly created Conseil Supêrieur de l'Audiovisuel, modeled after the august Cour Constitutionelle, will oversee an audiovisual sector that is more than ever in the grips of the state...

...Les Intellocrates is the title of a new book by Hamon and Rotman, which takes the reader backstage to the intrigues, deals, favors, and hidden rules of the game of the Parisian publishing world...

...Not only are historians looking at the past in a new nonmythical light...

...The Socialists, seeking to create an international fraternity based on latinitê, stress the plight of Latin Americans at the mercy of national fascisms and American economic imperialism...

...Marianne au combat: l'imagerie et la symbolique republicaine (Paris, 1979...

...This time, however, the étatmajor of her intellectuals may not follow...

...As heirs of the French Revolution, the Socialists not only wish to establish social justice and economic well-being at home...

...With the impulse of such "new left" initiatives, and given the intellectual shifts inside the Communist camp—with the defenestration of the proletariat at the 22nd Congress of the French CP and the lyrical pluralism of the 40th Congress of the CGT (the Communist-led Confederation Generale des Travailleurs)—it seemed for a while that the spirit of 1968 in its cultural guise had entered the political sanctum...

...Notes 1 Olivier Todd, Un fils rebelle(Paris, 1981...

...English translation, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge University Press/Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1981...

...Perrier, "Le Car," and Boursin replaced Sartre as the symbols of France...

...The intellectual and Socialist aggiornamenti therefore took place at very different levels, reflecting what were ultimately the two incompatible "siblings" of 1968: the libertarian and antiauthoritarian vocation of intellectuals close to civil society, and the political mass mobilization of Socialists bent on controlling the state...

...France's intellectual, like the rest of society, has "modernized" and professionalized himself, and "disenchanted" his vocation...

...On this topic, see also Regis Debray, Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France (Paris, 1979...

...Has the Left Bank crossed the Seine...

...Mona Ozouf, La Fete revolutionnaire 1789-1799 (Paris, 1976...

...French Socialists have not understood the intellectual bases of America's influence upon French society...

...The Left's êtatisme has predominated over a culturally dynamic civil society...

...The Socialist party (PSU—Parti Sociale Unifie) first, later its Rocardian wing and the CFDT (Confederation Francaise Democratique des Travailleurs) of Edmond Maire, and also the cluster of intellectuals around the reviews Esprit and Faire—all acted as go-betweens, fostering a new disposition toward social innovation and foreign examples...

...Or so it would seem...

...Paris, 1980...

...The 466 conflict is essentially between those who study the symbolism of revolutionary statues and those who lay flowers at their feet...

...The cultural tensions that France will experience in the coming years have little to do with confrontations between left and right...

...Levy tried to show in his latest tract, L'Ideologie Francaise, that anti-Semitism was the very core of French ideology since the Enlightenment, French intellectuals rose up en masse against him to qualify and ultimately disprove his thesis...

...American images and clothing, as well as language, became a shorthand way of declaring personal responsibility and creativity...

...B. de Constant, De la Liberte chez les moderns, M. Gauchet, ed...

...The first reason is historical: they feel that the Gulag has no roots in France, where the left from the beginning was steeped in the values of democracy...

...French philosophers, historians, and social scientists, on the other hand, place the Gulag at the very center of their debates, for they believe that its implications are directly relevant to an understanding of France's historical past and political present...

...They are a far more homogeneous group than their 463 Anglo-Saxon peers because they share a mission (beyond the Platonic search for truth): the dismantling of France's political, historical, and cultural orthodoxies...

...They also want to show the world that there is a "Latin" alternative to "flabby" Northern social democracy, American economic imperialism, and Soviet totalitarianism...

...The Gulag FRENCH SOCIALISTS now vigorously condemn the Gulag, after having stressed for many years the special circumstances (underdevelopment, encirclement) that could explain yet not justify it...

...they are also deliberately probing into the "underside" of French history, its silences and skeletons...

...They resent the intrusion of the Gulag in French affairs—for two key reasons...

...France's traditional geography is now pitted against the new geography of the mind in a major cultural struggle...

...Leading philosophers, historians, social scientists, and cultural activists who have come under the spell of an "open" and relativized France— such as Michel Foucault, Claude Lefort, Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie, Francois Furet, and Cornelius Castoriadis—now dominate the intellectual scene...

...It is in such a spirit that Libêration was able to compare Prime Minister Mauroy's war on unemployment to Petain's social policies, in what amounted to political blasphemy for the Socialists but was perfectly admissible for the intellectuals as anthropologists.' Old taboos are all the more easily challenged because intellectuals have lifted the veil under which they had previously shrouded their "noble" work...

...Socialist references to the glory of French culture, to France's mission and time-steeped values, will not go over well with generations that have replaced the pink and green of France and Germany in Mitterrand's schoolboy maps with the metallic reflections of intergalactic star wars...

...At stake is a much more fundamental definition of France—the country's past and future, its international reference points and role...

...While the Socialists celebrate, some intellectuals are coming to the conclusion that, if France is the libertarian pluralist democracy Mitterrand praises, it is not thanks to the French Revolution but to the Restoration, which established the principles of formal liberties and pluralism—the only concrete guarantors against totalitarianism.' The implications of the Gulag also divide Socialists and intellectuals on another front—that of viewing oppressive regimes around the world...

...Culturally detached analyses of a relativized France became fashionable in the 1970s, precisely at the time when French Socialists, led by Mitterrand, were rebuilding their party by stressing the popular roots and glorious tradition of the French left...

...In the early 1970s, the French radical left became interested in California countercultures and in the variety of liberation movements that America has produced...

...Despite their evolution toward a hard-line approach to the Soviet Union, their condemnation of 464 the Gulag and their friendly feelings toward the U.S.A., the Socialists of 1982 have remained faithful to their political and cultural ideas of 1971...

...The "Moderns" are supported by a constituency that goes well beyond the Left Bank—including journalists, social activists, media persons, liberal professionals, students, and "plain people," many of them living in the provinces, who have come to appreciate a culture open to an international frame...

...France's much publicized nouveaux philosophes —who, in 1977, turned Solzhenitsyn into summer reading and whom the left viewed as intellectual bridgeheads to Giscardian France— were really a manifestation of a far stronger and more original intellectual current...

...The second cultivates instead an image of France as a nation endowed with a special mission, as a cultural and political beacon for a world seeking values beyond economic growth...

...Claude Lefort and Francois Furet are among their best known representatives...

...The past is a vast reservoir for political and cultural inspiration, a national myth to be celebrated—as in Mitterrand's Pantheon procession past the key symbols of the French left...

...M. Aguhlon, La Republique au village (Paris, 1979...

...Armed with Jaures, Guesde, and Blum, French Socialists consider themselves above all suspicion of totalitarianism and their past uncontaminated by Soviet deviations or, for that matter, by German Marxism...

...Ultimately America, the Gulag, and France's past are only symbols of a far wider clash of mentalité between French Socialists and French intellectuals—two worlds that are steadily growing farther apart, making the Socialist cultural wager as difficult to implement as their economic program...

...dailies such as Le Matin and Liberation, which publish editorials and articles by intellectuals commenting on the counterculture, Soviet expansionism, French republican traditions...

...weeklies such as Le Nouvel Observateur, whose cultural essays and reviews convey the ideas of the Parisian intellectual elite to its provincial epigones...

...There is a fusion of Barres and Malraux in Mitterrand's analysis of France, which he shares most deeply with de Gaulle, and it is de Gaulle whom he imitates not only culturally but also politically in his Socialist version of French grandeur...

...Nor can one forget the role of television, where intellectuals appear frequently on such shows as Apostrophes to comment on their books...

...Clad in socialist pink, she once more leads her troops into battle...

...But if America formed the backdrop for France's cultural opening-up, it is the Gulag that has given rise to the major tensions between French Socialists and intellectuals...

...It is not 1968 that has taken over the waves but a Socialist 1958 and tempered by a very "Latin" accommodation to power...

...In reality, there has never been a greater potential for conflict between French intellectuals and politics than now with the Socialists in power...

...Economics may suffer, but ideas should prosper under such a government...

...One should not underestimate the subterranean implications of such a cultural defeat for a generation that is tired of being treated as a "minor" by the sacrosanct state...

...2 The ultimate implications of all this research and thought are radically incompatible with the basic, historical Weltanschauung of the Socialists in power for whom the French Revolution is the prime mover of all their political action...

...All those who under Giscard had urged for mass media free from political pressures and the creation of independent TV and radio stations now were defeated...

...an "open" France is not new...

...But Mitterrand's total victory, the marginalization of the Rocardian wing inside the Socialist party and in the government, and the hardening position of the French CP and CGT along old orthodox lines have dispelled the hope of a significant bridge between politics and culture...

...The French left came to power with roses in the Pantheon, Beethoven in the streets, a presidentwriter, and a minister of culture who directed plays rather than bureaucracies: a far cry from Giscard under whose reign culture was little more than the "proper," somewhat fossilized accoutrement of the social life of an enarque (graduate of l'Ecole nationale d'administration...

...France FRENCH SOCIALISTS have a very nationalistic, literary, and quasimystical vision of France that stands in marked contrast to the cosmopolitanism of France's modern intellectuals...

...The first gives priority to keeping the country abreast of the more advanced industrial nations, at the cost of accepting that France is only one country among others...

...Francois Furet, Penser la revolution francaise (Paris 1978...

...Under Mitterrand, Marianne is alive and well...

...Among them are cultural reviews such as Le Debat, which aims to critically reassess French culture and society, and Esprit, which has put aside its post-1968 preoccupations with autogestion to pursue the implications of Soviet totalitarianism for the West...

...English translation, Marianne into Battle (Cambridge University Press/Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1981...

...The result has been a major intellectual rereading of the "silences" of the French left, a negative reevaluation of the Communist party, a reconsideration of liberal democracy and formal liberties and, most of all, a direct confrontation with the holiest of historical topics—the French Revolution...

...Hence French intellectuals were shocked when a Socialist France signed the gas-pipeline deal with the Soviet Union shortly after the military state of siege began in Poland—and they do have a strong suspicion that socialism in France cannot be understood in terms that are totally divorced from its foreign (failed) incarnations...

...L'Invention democratique, (Paris, 1981...

...But there are limits to French "culpabilization...

...Is there a major entente between politics, intellectuals, and culture in Mitterrand's France...

...the closing to the East and the growing recognition of the nature of the Soviet regime and the Gulag...

...The small village with a church steeple, which radiated la force tranquille behind Mitterrand in his presidential campaign poster, spoke well of the Socialist sensitivity to a France a l'heure de son clocher, a France whose country roots are traditional and calm and that is, above all, uninterested in the dynamic notion of constant change...

...The second reason is political: French Socialists have built their party strategy around a political alliance with the French Communists, whom they have always considered integral members of the body politic, and as a true expression of the French people...

...With their conviction that the roots of the Gulag are not to be found in Russian backwardness but in Western totalitarian ideas and revolutionary practice, French intellectuals in effect have brought the Gulag home...

...The Washington Post's example of investigative reporting conditioned an entire post1968 generation of French journalists—just as greater exposure to American universities would breed among French philosophers and historians a healthy appreciation for empirical approaches, for logical positivism, and especially for the model of the intellectual as modest purveyor of knowledge, in an anti-Sartrian stance.' America rapidly became synonymous with the realm of the possible...

...They did not realize that, for most of the French, American culture (especially films) crossed borders not because of its economic clout but because of its quality...

...J. Ozouf 2nd F. Furet, Lire et ecrire: !'alphabetisation des francais de Calvin a Jules Ferry (Paris, 1977...

...This stance could not be further removed from the concerns of France's intellectuals, who have turned to the past with the deliberate intent of breaking away from its myths and its old battles...

...Marcel Gauchet and Gladys Swain, La Pratique de /'Esprit Humain: !'institution asiliaire et la revolution democratique (Paris, 1980...

...The internal regime of the Soviet Union and the Gulag were still largely passed over in silence by a political left entranced by Bolshevik revolutionary postures and bent on consolidating an alliance with the French Communist party...

...For the intellectuals, however, the past has become a domain for the hunting-down of taboos...