MITTERRAND'S TECHNOCRATIC SOCIALISM with a Comment by Michael Harrington and a Reply

...As I reported in these pages earlier, after Mitterrand came to power in 1981, he began with a flurry of ambitious political and economic moves...

...The Communists participated in the Mauroy government but have now decided to stay out...

...Nevertheless, the Socialists, unless they decide on a determined "opening to the right" in the 1986 elections—of which more later— will have to keep open some bridges to the Communists if they hope for their votes in the second round of the elections...

...It is divided into roughly three major camps...

...As Herbert Liithy once said, "The political repub48 lic [was] still subject to the moral guardianship of the republic of letters...

...Fabius gave an accomplished presentation of budgetary, financial, and, above all, industrial issues...

...That Le Pen has been able to attract roughly 10 percent of the French electorate in the recent European elections is extremely disturbing...

...Although the Socialist Project dates from 1980, its essential ideas were developed seven or eight years earlier, when conditions in France still permitted a vision of a virtuous circle of growth...

...The right points with envy and admiration to Thatcher and Reagan, extolling their support for deregulation, risk, and initiative...

...Major failures in economic policies rarely hinge on just one mistake...

...The paradox, then, is this: America is the only country in which the French socialist vision could have been put into practice...

...He grew up in the political environment of the postwar Fourth Republic, one of the least principled periods of French political history...

...As we know, the worst recession since the•Great Depression hit the French—and the world—economy...

...For over a year they attempted a complicated balancing act in voting for the government at least on key issues while, together with the CGT, capitalizing on popular discontent with government policies, sharply criticizing its policies...

...So French Socialist Keynesianism probably created more jobs in West Germany than in France...

...In addition, the bulk of the membership is made up of teachers, public employees, and other white-collar workers...

...2) I fully agree with what Mike Harrington says about the free-enterprise illusions of much of the French intelligentsia...

...There are now no intellectuals with.the stature of their predecessors...

...The problem, I would suggest, is not that Mitterrand lacked a vision—he not only had one but put it into practice, redeeming almost every single one of his campaign promises in a legislative whirlwind during 1981 and early 1982—but that his vision was based upon the assumptions of the '70s...

...Indeed, one socialist economist, SergeChristophe Kolm, has effectively argued that a more realistic monetary exchange policy would have alleviated many of the Socialist problems...

...Finally, there is my most substantial difference with Lewis Coser: that he puts the essential— the position of France in the world econ52 omy—in a final note...

...its share of young people's ballots is down to 6 percent...

...But unfortunately, as may frequently be the case when sudden revelations break though previous defenses, the subsequent reaction had so highly emotional a character that it resulted in wholesale abandonment among many intellectuals of previous rational moorings in the general traditions of the left...

...after the defeat of France...

...But on three separate counts, my emphasis would be a bit different...

...The virtuous circle of growth thus set in motion through a redistributive intervention would provide surpluses allowing for industrial policy and planning to restructure French industry, for the creation of new jobs, and serve as the economic base for a "self-managed," decentralized socialism that would increase productivity through participation...

...Mitterrand didn't just slip on a banana peel, his entire course proved to be disastrous...

...If Mitterrand does not undertake such a move, or if he does not succeed, the Socialist left might shrink again to the quantith nêgligeable it was in the years of de Gaulle's ascendancy...

...It is less authoritarian, and more fully committed to an unfettered market economy...

...There are occasional reports that Arthur Laffer is high on the reading list at the Elysee, but the new finance minister in the Fabius government, Pierre Beregovoy, made it quite clear in September that he understood the reactionary—and serendipitous—basis of the Reagan policy...

...It is widely said that Michel Roccard advised the president-elect to devalue on inauguration day (much as did Olof Palme, Felipe Gonzalez, and Mario Soares—who all had the advantage of having watched the first Mitterrand period...

...He fielded technical questions in a confident and sure-footed manner...

...Still, the romance of Silicon Valley is very much alive in Paris, even though Business Week recently documented that the days of entrepreneurial geniuses creating Apple computers in the garage are coming to an end...

...As in other periods of cultural decadence, the attention of the cultured public has turned to a nostalgic regard for the past and its alleged glories...

...A FEW COMMENTS on the Communist party are in order...

...Those intellectuals who still support Mitterrand are now his "class enemies...

...Some of the French intellectuals, Julliard rightly pointed out, can't think of two different ideas at the same time and therefore move from monomania to monomania...

...But leftwing intellectuals of less stature than Sartre or Camus have largely turned away from active support for the Mitterrand regime...

...Had the Mitterrand government been able to provide an inspiring vision similar to that provided earlier by a Jean Jaures or Leon Blum, this rightward tide might well have been arrested or turned back...

...Through a kind of vicious syllogism they convinced themselves that planned social changes of whatever kind would be stepping stones on the road to totalitarian serfdom...

...The problem of Mitterrand and his comrades was not the absence of a vision, but their loyal commitment to a vision that had become outmoded when they reached power...

...Even though he has been repudiated by the RPR and the UDF top leadership, many of their local leaders have not disdained an alliance with Le Pen when the going got tough...

...There is also the technocratic wing closest to Mitterrand, led by such men as Jacques Delors and Laurent Fabius, and there are the coteries of municipal bosses such as Gaston Deferre, the king of Marseille, and Pierre Mauroy, the master of Lille...

...Given the current disarray on the left, it stands to reason that the right has become very cocky and confident...

...The CP "line" reminds one of the outspoken words that Louis Veuillot, a 19th-century Ultramontane Catholic reactionary, addressed to the liberals of his day: "When you are the masters, we claim complete liberty for ourselves because your principles require it, and when we are the masters, we refuse it to you because it is contrary to our principles...

...1) Yes, the "Socialist Project" adopted in 1980 is a fine document...

...A move to the right by Mitterrand will be facilitated by the marked decline of his support in the ranks of prominent left intellectuals, and by the numerical decline and loss of influence of these intellectuals...

...It stands nowadays for a weak state, that is, minimal intervention in economic affairs, and maximum freedom for 50 the self-regulated market...

...To be sure, there were dissenting voices, such as that of Raymond Aron, but they were hardly listened to...

...But while it profits from the current disaffection with planning, it is internally divided, and torn between several highly competitive would-be standard-bearers...

...My second difference in shading has to do with the intellectuals...

...He is committed, and that is probably his only real commitment, to the modernization of French industry and the rebuilding of French national power...

...This will be a powerful incentive for Mitterrand to move to an alliance with the "moderate" center...

...3) Michel Roccard was right in suggesting that the government should have devalued at its inception...

...There is a "left" under Jean-Pierre Chevenement, which is protectionist and wishes to cut as many relations as possible between the French economy and the rest of the capitalist world, so as to build a kind of tight little French socialist island...

...The mode of paying for much of the welfare state (payroll taxes that act as a disincentive to hiring) and the political consequences of an exceedingly honorable policy that is protecting the poor more than the middle class and the workers were part of a process that led to a growing internal deficit when the promised world recovery failed to materialize...

...He has now publicly stated that he wishes no longer to be identified with left political views and attitudes, and that he will contribute to any publication that is ready to print his articles, be it on the left or the right...

...Raymond Aron died last year, Michel Foucault passed away a few months ago, and the last towering figure, LeviStrauss, is 80 years old...

...The French, alas, sometimes admire us badly and are about as accurate with regard to the Adam Smithian triumphs in California as they are about the tragicomic genius of Jerry Lewis...

...The failures of national planning have shown him the virtues of the free market, and the ineptitudes of the tutelary state have convinced him of the virtues of unfettered individualism...

...It is strongly authoritarian in orientation, while still preaching the gospel of the free market and pointing with admiration to the "achievements" of Thatcher and Reagan...

...Convinced that the CP/SP alliance that brought him to power in 1981 will not prevail in the 1986 elections, he has loosened remaining ties to the CP and is plainly casting about for new allies in the center...

...Its traditions are Gaullist and Bonapartist, and it is solidly supported by the Catholic middle- and uppermiddle classes...

...The CP has clearly come upon evil days...

...Most of these measures, admirable as they were, were hardly particularly socialist in character...

...The CP is enfeebled and shrinking...

...The government proceeded with measures of decentralization that, so it hoped, would loosen the stranglehold As I have reported in these pages previously, much of the trouble the Mitterrand regime has encountered stems from international economic factors over which it has had very little control...

...Finally, there has arisen a powerful move47 ment of the extreme right under the semifascist demagogue Jean-Marie Le Pen...

...Le Pen is a racist demagogue of the first order...

...They were central to the anti-Nazi ideological mobilization before the war, and they were in the vanguard of opposition to the colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria...

...A significant proportion of formerly left-wing intellectuals have either defected from left positions entirely, or have withdrawn into apolitical neutrality...

...Because of the policies of Giscard and Barre, there was deindustrialization in the French capital-goods sector...

...But, we now know very well, there is one country that is free from such vulgar disciplinary measures of the free market: the United States of America...

...When I was living and teaching in Paris in the spring of 1983, and even more so following the French press since then, I was appalled at the growth of fundamentalist free-enterprise illusions...

...Jean-Marie Domenach, for decades the guiding spirit of the influential Christian socialist magazine Esprit, published last year a short book, significantly entitled Letters to My Class Enemies, in which he argued that he had been mistaken for many years in his belief that political freedom would be compatible with a socialist and planned direction of the economy...

...As Wolfgang Merkel put it in a recent analysis of the Italian Socialist party in Die Neue Gesellschaft, "In the years of economic growth, the European left pondered the democratization of the economy and redistribution...

...After a honeymoon that lasted only a year, the government reversed its course...

...The audience consisted largely of academics, civil servants, and political journalists...

...This new kind of growth was to be egalitarian, powered in part by a progressive redistribution of income, "autonomous" through controls on multinationals and a lessening of dependency on imported energy...

...ALL THIS is not to say that the right has necessarily an easier time when it comes to ideological or intellectual issues...

...it no longer attracts the young the way it did 10 or 20 years ago...

...Let me give only three salient examples of this mischievous intellectual trend...

...A recent article in Le Nouvel Observateur by Jacques Julliard was entitled (in English in the original) "Goodbye Mao, Hello Ronnie...

...He left it in 1956 but for many years thereafter remained a man of the left...

...Deferre and Mauroy have now been eliminated from the Fabius government, but all the other tendencies are represented in his cabinet...

...To be sure, Mitterrand's left Keynesian poli53 cies were largely wrecked by an entirely mistaken assessment of the international economic situation...

...In previous periods, prominent intellectuals, such as Gide, Mauriac, or Malraux before the war, and Camus, Sartre, or Merleau-Ponty in the postwar years, served as a kind of cultural superego to left politicians...

...I am not convinced by Kolm's argument that a better monetary policy would have alleviated most problems...

...When Thomas Hobbes wrote in his Leviathan that autonomous corporations are "many lesser Commonwealths in the bowels of a gr[e]ater, like worms in the entrails of a natural man," he expressed a view that is secretly shared by Jacobin technocrats on the left and Bonapartist technocrats on the right, even though the former may prattle of self-management and the latter of the benefits of unfettered markets...

...Had the Mitterrand regime been able to inspire enthusiasm and dedication in a major part of the population, it might have weathered economic difficulties...

...1 do not go here into this matter again, but my criticism of the Mitterrand regime should be read against a background of international monetary and financial conditions that would have made things very difficult even if the government had been less inept and more imaginative...

...Yet it became clear soon after the Socialists' ascension to power in 1981 that only few among the major intellectuals supported them with any enthusiasm...

...The French socialist symbol of the fist and a rose was an attempt to state graphically the concept of a joining of power and beauty...

...Similarly, the right professes to be appalled by the continued overcentralization of the French economy and society, while it is just as afraid as its Jacobin counterparts on the left of measures of decentralization...

...What is especially frightening is that much of his vote does not come from the traditional right—practicing Catholics are relatively weak in the ranks of the National Front—but from disaffected Communists and other alienated, former left voters...

...others, like Jean-Paul Sartre and his circle, could not bring themselves to join but still looked eastward with a large measure of approbation or, at least, benevolent expectation...

...In Sweden, 92 percent of all wage earners are unionized, and unionization of the other Scandinavian countries ranges from 62 to 85 percent...

...Above all, the foreign debts multiplied...

...Although the Communists are now likely to make hay of the difficulties of the new government and to ride a wave of popular discontent, they are severely hampered by the fact that their major bases are precisely in the declining smokestack industries...

...In most European countries, socialist and social democratic parties are mass parties or at least parties firmly rooted in a mass union movement...

...To explain why this is the case requires recalling a few facts about the political structure of the French left...

...of a central bureaucracy that had dominated France since the days of Napoleon...

...The UDF capitalizes on the many former leftists' disillusionment with social planning and argues that such planning "inevitably" leads to totalitarianism...

...The "Socialist Project," adopted by the party in 1980 and the basis of the 1981 presidential and electoral campaign, was an attempt to synthesize traditional socialist ideas with the concerns about the quality of life that erupted in May 1968...

...It would be a mistake, however, to account for the present crisis of the left in France only in terms of economic miscalculations...

...Nor did he come up with anything worthwhile when similar questions were raised by others in the audience...

...FOR MANY YEARS after the end of the war, French intellectual life was dominated by Communists and fellow travelers...

...No major policy decision made in the last three years can be traced to the vision outlined in that Project...

...It is its utter lack of a comprehensive vision and inspiring ideals, which could bring forth a willingness to endure some sacrifice in the here and now, that accounts for the present miserable standing of the regime in the eyes of a majority of the population...

...There are, to be sure, some Socialist leaders, such as Michel Rocard, who might be inclined to start afresh, stressing democratic participation, self-management, and decentralization in opposition to technocratic planning, but they are for the time being neutralized by the technocrats and kept in check by appeals to Socialist unity...

...Where only a year earlier the president and the premier had talked about huge increases in the production of steel and coal, they now proceeded to close pits and inefficient steel plants...

...Mike Harrington's point that only in a vast country like ours would the Mitterrand policy have had a chance, is well taken...

...LET ME CLOSE on a terrible irony...

...Its traditions are anchored in the liberal-centrist traditions of the July monarchy (1830-48...

...A kind of Frank Sinatra with brains, he recently had an immense impact on public opinion when he abjured his fellow-traveling past, in an hourlong interview on prime-time television, expressed some admiration for Ronald Reagan, and waxed enthusiastic about freedom, be it of expression or of the market...

...The overvaluation of the French franc when Mitterrand took power put his country at a structural disadvantage vis-a-vis the world in general and the West Germans in particular...

...This imbalance, inherited from Giscard along with the deindustrialization of the capital-goods sector, was a major, and destructive, constraint upon Mitterrand...

...Fabius looked perplexed, helpless, and uttered a few meaningless phrases...

...So it is with the soaring simplifications of the new French (free-enterprise) "liberalism," which totally ignores the social costs of its elegant supply-and-demand curves...

...This might have worked in a huge country like the United States, but it couldn't work in France...

...Although it counts many sons and daughters of workers in its ranks, it has hardly any working-class membership...

...Not only is the Socialist party organizationally and numerically weak, it is also split into a number of factions...

...They were then told by all the forecasts— including the official projections of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development— that a shallow and short recession would be followed by a strong recovery...

...Both sides behave like spurned lovers frozen into rigid stances of hostility...

...The horrors of Stalinism, Domenach argued, had cured him of any illusions about communism...

...When the Socialists came to power in 1981, they were sure that they would find enthusiastic support among the intellectuals...

...A similar trajectory from the left to the right marks the intellectual career of the man who is perhaps, next to Ferdinand Braudel, the most eminent historian of contemporary France, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie...

...Given the lack of dependable transmission 46 belts to a popular base, it was to be predicted, as it has now come to pass, that the technocrats would win over the populists...

...While the Communists lay low in the first year or two of the Mitterrand regime, they became ever more militant in their criticism of governmental policies in 1983 and 1984...

...Mitterrand, whose socialist past is of relatively recent vintage, would have fewer scruples...

...Solzhenitsyn had considerable influence on American opinion, but his impact in France was much stronger...

...A Manichean vision where the Soviet Union and the Third World stood for the forces of light and America and the other capitalist powers stood for the forces of darkness dominated most intellectual discourse...

...In those years the left-wing press, the major literary and philosophical journals, the publishing world as well as the mass media were largely dominated by Stalinists or, more often, by fellow travelers...

...His government is now dominated by technocrats who value efficiency above all...

...Nobody, really nobody, alluded spontaneously to the Project in any conversation...

...The fellow-traveling consensus began to break only with the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and its brutal suppression by Russian tanks...

...While right-wing and centrist regimes can always be assured of support from the powerful and unified organizations of the industrial and financial powers that be, no such base is available to the Socialists...

...And now many have come to feel that it is a government by technocrats for technocratic goals...

...My reading of these developments differs from Lewis Coser's in that it puts less of an emphasis upon the subjective failures of the French and more stress on an economic transition that has subverted the economic wisdom of the left in every country...

...In France, more than anywhere else in Western Europe, with the possible exception of Italy, the major current among intellectuals carried them eastward as well as leftward...

...The ratio of members to voters is, to my knowledge, the lowest in all of Europe...

...He knew all about means, and hardly anything about ends...

...But to think that it could have worked in France is only an added piece of evidence to prove that technocratic megalomania rather than socialist convictions guided the Mitterrand regime almost from its inception...

...His anti-Semitism, which he recently has toned down, is nevertheless clearly present...

...Were elections to be held tomorrow, the RPR would surely win a plurality of the electorate...

...But in France, given its rigid social structure, it fell to Socialists to implement what elsewhere in Europe had been realized by left-liberal forces, often, of course, with the help of social democratic parties...

...Aron's memoirs and Sartre's letters to Simone de Beauvoir head the best-seller lists, and even the diaries of such relatively peripheral figures as Jean Cocteau command a great deal of attention...

...Our country has run up a balance of trade and internal deficit that makes the French look like abstemious Milton Friedmanites, and it has done so in the name of a free-enterprise ideology...

...French intellectuals, at least since the 1930s, were in their majority on the Socialist, near-Socialist, or Communist left, even though a minority supported the Vichy regime, or collaborated with the Nazi occupiers...

...Many of them joined the CP...

...The last decades of the 20th century, like the last decades of the 19th, are witnessing a global transformation of all previous economic relationships...

...French private and corporate consumers, finding that products of other Common Market nations were cheaper, bought these rather than French goods, so that France's trade balance deteriorated rapidly and its foreign debts increased alarmingly...

...As it is, the lack of vision of this government of technocrats, even more so than its manifest lack of success on its own terms, has created a situation where intellectuals despise the government, and the government, no longer sustained by intellectual moral guidance, despises intellectuals...

...I cannot help but be pessimistic about the future of socialism in France...

...What is more, all its surface devotion to democracy sounds hollow given the fact that, as distinct from its Italian and Spanish counterparts, it has never clearly repudiated its ties to the Kremlin...

...In steel, coal, automobile, and shipbuilding there will be huge layoffs in the months and years to come, and unemployed workers, or those forced into early retirement, are by no means as easily mobilized as employed workers...

...There is a decentralizing and participatory-democratic wing under Michel Rocard...

...Leapfrogging over the left-liberal tradition, many landed on the right...

...I recently spent the better part of a year in Paris and saw a good number of writers, academicians, and journalists...

...When Ramsay MacDonald broke with the British Labour party to build a national union with the traditional forces of the right, he surely felt a measure of unease and guilt for having abandoned the socialist principles to which he had adhered for a lifetime...

...It is now estimated that unemployment, which hovered around 2 million in the early Mitterrand period, is likely to approach 2.5 million, that is, well over 10 percent of the work force, at the end of the current year...

...Solzhenitsyn broke the dike of collective repression as to the true nature of the Soviet regime...

...Mitterrand has no particular political vision, in fact he doesn't have many convictions...

...He supplements what I had to say on that count...

...Yet even here it is no good to exonerate the government by pointing to circumstances beyond its reach...

...In contrast to the days of Leon Blum's Popular Front government, the intellectuals kept a cultivated distance from the Socialist house of power...

...It has lost both members and voters...

...I t is a good thing that the Soviet myth is now as dead in France as it has been for decades in America...

...Mitterrand attempted to reflate the economy by putting new purchasing power into the hands of French consumers...

...It abolished the death penalty, did away with exceptional military tribunals, reduced the standard work week by an hour, increased the rights and representation of workers in the workplace, and made various improvements in social security...

...Le Pen has begun to control the swing voters that might decide contests between the traditional right and the traditional left...

...If I am right, it was the external and internal deficit, more than any other factor, that undercut the commitment to a new kind of creative growth...

...q Michael Harrington Comments I agree with most of what Lewis Coser writes about the crisis of French socialism...

...This was especially resented since it followed upon a long period of steady increases under de Gaulle and his successors...

...Mitterrand and the Socialists came to power in an entirely different world than the one in which they had elaborated their theory and practice...

...That meant, among many other things, that economic growth caused, rather than resolved, a deficit in the balance of payments, since it required a massive (50 percent) importation of machines to produce machines...

...These pressures from the outside were then reinforced within France by the failure of the virtuous circle...

...q Lewis Coser Replies Michael Harrington and I differ on nuances of interpretation while we agree on essentials...

...Let me just list a few of the structural constraints that weighed so heavily upon Mitterrand...

...In the 1980 Socialist Project one finds a discussion, not simply of economic growth but of a "new kind of growth...

...As a result unemployment increased rapidly, 45 especially in basic smokestack industries...

...Some of them, such as the official presidential spokesman Max Gallo and the opportunist Regis Debray, were attracted to the seats of power...

...When it came to economic matters, the Mitterrand regime in its first year in office miscalculated disastrously...

...The recent losses of the CP and the SP in both local and national elections and the lack of mass support in the form of a strong party and/or strong unions have led Mitterrand to reorient his policies toward the center...

...In sum, the "objective" circumstances were indeed most unpropitious, but "subjective" incompetence made things even worse...

...The politics of modernization and technocratic planning, even if they are ultimately going to meet with some success, will surely not be implemented fast enough to lead to a reversal of the dismal economic situation by the time of the 1986 elections...

...The new kind of growth was to be "creative" in its emphasis, not simply upon research, but also on new opportunities for the individual, such as reduction of work time, and solidaristic in its commitment to the Third World through a global Keynesianism...

...The so-called New Philosophers are feeble epigones, and in almost all areas of French intellectual life one notes a pronounced decline in creativity...

...A tentative answer has to reach back to the conditions of French cultural life after the Liberation...

...They have now left the government largely because Mitterrand and Fabius were no longer willing to tolerate their Janus-like behavior...

...The split of the Soviet camp through the defection of Yugoslavia and China, and later the invasion of Afghanistan as well as the suppression of the Solidarity movement in Poland, further contributed to a turning away from Big Brother...

...Many similar ideological and political shifts could be adduced...

...Though they were often internally divided, they nevertheless lent their collective prestige to a politics of justice, equality, and freedom that had been the heritage of the left ever since the Dreyfus affair...

...Under such circumstances, a badly mauled left would become a malleable auxiliary of centrist politicians, quite as it was through most of the Third Republic...

...He is, to be sure, no intellectual, but he is a thoughtful person with a long involvement in the politics of the fellow-traveling left...

...This superior technocrat, graduate of the elite schools of France, had never given any serious thought to such questions...

...In 1982, and even more pronouncedly in 1983, it opted for a program of austerity and fiscal restraint...

...Where there is no vision, the left perishes...

...Mao," Julliard comments, "is being reborn with the features of Adam Smith...

...The 49 French had succeeded for decades, through various strategies of selective inattention, in shielding themselves from the realities of Soviet totalitarianism...

...Those who think that you can recapture support by reducing income taxes are either fools or knaves...

...At bottom it hates local autonomy, which hampers technocratic direction from the Parisian center...

...The fact is, however, that it has not served as a guide to action for the Mitterrand regime, except perhaps in its honeymoon period right after the 1981 elections...

...These were steps that could have been taken by a left-liberal regime...

...However, they did not do so precisely because they were not inspired by a vision but because, to quote Mike Harrington, they were "very conservative in international monetary matters...

...The weakness of the union movement might have been compensated for by a strong mass organization of the Socialist party...

...But then someone asked: "What is the vision [l'imaginaire] of the government...

...With the scarcity of resources and the accompanying structural problems of the welfare state [in recent years] the left was without any basic conceptions...

...But everybody knows the singer and actor Yves Montand...

...In contrast, only some 20 percent of all French wage earners belong to unions and, even more important, they are split between four sharply divided union organizations (not counting the separate unions of teachers and middle-managers): the Communist-dominated CGT, the Socialist-oriented yet autonomous CFDT, the apolitical business union, Force Ouvriere, and the Christian union...

...They formulated and defined a left credo that, even though often utopian, nevertheless reminded more pragmatic politicians that there were limits to realpolitik...

...The names of Domenach and Le Roy Ladurie are not likely to be known beyond the narrow ranks of intellectuals...

...The leader of the "left" wing, despite his previous protestations about the need not to break with the Communists, is part of the new government, and the Rocard wing is also represented, but the balance has shifted in the technocratic direction...

...Privatized individuals provide no secure bases for an offensive political strategy...

...What had happened...

...and it hit its lowest mark in the recent European elections, where it got barely 11 percent of the votes, its lowest point in 60 years and roughly the same proportion as the extreme right-wing, semifascist National Front...

...But these events on the world scene were perhaps not as consequential in their impact on the French intellectual world as the publications of Solzhenitsyn, especially his books on the Gulag...

...The RPR, led by Jacques Chirac, is now the dominating force...

...The son of a Vichy minister who later took part in the Resistance, Ladurie joined the Communist party after the war...

...The centrist UDF—led by Raymond Barre, the former prime minister, and Giscard d'Estaing, the former president—is much less united than Chirac's party...

...Such a turn will bring him into more accentuated conflicts with the CP and might also lead to some defections within the SP Mitterrand seems to have decided that a weakening of his ties to some force on the left is worth taking in his stride if it can be compensated for by strengthened support elsewhere...

...It now seemed that while the "bourgeois" regimes had been able to "give," even if only through a trickle-down effect, the Socialists were "taking away" what had previously been gained...

...What I witnessed there was not the failure of an individual but the failure of the entire Mitterrand regime...

...The quest for a new mode of life," that program said, "will give rise to new needs—housing, public services, the improvement of the framework of life, protection of the environment, and the struggle 51 against pollution—though the present needs will not disappear...

...He has many prejudices but few beliefs...

...It has a good number of upwardly mobile members with working-class backgrounds, but it is almost completely divorced from the working class itself...

...most, however, not only refused official positions but showed a marked reluctance to support the government in any way...

...As a result, while members of the working and lower-middle class voted for Mitterrand in 1981 because they believed him to be for the people, they never had reason to believe that he represented government by the people...

...This tendency, I am afraid, will be reinforced in the next two years, and it bodes ill for French democracy...

...If, to achieve these goals, social justice and social equality will have to be put on a back burner, that's just too bad...

...The CP had acquired enormous prestige by its massive participation in the Resistance movement, even though it had joined that movement only after the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union and not...

...The politics of austerity since 1982 has not only led to higher unemployment, but also to the gradual whittling away of the purchasing power of the lower-middle and working class...

...There is a 180-degree turn in content, but the methodology remains the same...

...Le Pen's major slogans are xenophobic appeals against foreigners, especially North Africans, who make up a significant portion of the unskilled and semiskilled labor force and suffer from high unemployment...

...An intensely vain and ambitious man, he will cling to power even if that would mean discarding previous supporters and previous programmatic pronouncements...

...In any case, since World War II, to be an intellectual has meant to be more or less on the left of the political spectrum...

...In subsequent years, the campaigns against NATO and German rearmament, against the colonial war in Vietnam, and in support of Algerian independence forged and reforged the unity of the French intellectual left...

...His abandonment of the school reform legislation that was meant to reinforce public controls over Catholic schools and has raised a storm of protest on the right and in the center, his tax reductions that will mainly favor the well-to-do, and a host of other signs point to his determination to reorient his policies toward an alliance with parties of the center...

...But it also champions a strong and authoritarian state, deriding what it considers Mitterrand's inability to come to grips with crime in the street and his liberal "softness" in regard to punishment of criminals...

...The practical measures that were to effect this vision included a program of left Keynesian economic stimuli that would channel resources disproportionately to the working poor (the "SMICards," or minimum-wage workers...

...But then, socialists like Mitterrand (and Harold Wilson in the 1960s) often try to prove their "soundness" to an incredulous business community by being very conservative in international monetary matters...

...Let me deal with his three points seriatim...

...In Austria, Germany, and Britain, a high percentage of the work force are members of unions that are closely tied to mass social democratic or labor parties...

...I dealt with this in two previous articles and hence felt no need to refer to it again, except in a footnote...

...Banking on a rapid recovery from the worldwide recession, it aimed at stimulating purchasing power on the domestic scene and at increasing exports...

...As a consequence, the Socialist government has no reliable transmission belt to the mass of wage earners, and no secure base in the workplace...

...What is more, the CP has lost the support of all major intellectuals, and it is slowly being pushed into a marginal position from which it will find it very hard to extricate itself...

...But the Bonapartist-authoritarian undercurrents on the right are much stronger than they are in Britain or in America, so that those who clamor for the freedom of the market are at the same time inclined to enforce so-called freedoms through bureaucratic and technocratic directives...

...its organizations have ossified, and its stereotyped message works only with an aging core of true believers...

...But in fact this party is weak both numerically and organizationally...

...When the worldwide recession, instead of easing, increased further, and when it became clear that the large-scale nationalization of banking and key industrial enterprises required enormous outlays by the government, France's budget deficits increased sharply...

...They hence lagged by several decades behind the awareness in American intellectual circles that the Soviet Union was a totalitarian nightmare...

...Such a move is likely to demoralize the left for a long time to come...

...That trend was then reinforced by the limits of national Keynesian politics in a world economy that was undergoing greater change than at any time in a hundred years...

...They argued that, since the Soviet horror was based on the suppression of individual freedom and public liberty, therefore any planned society, any attempt to interfere with the "free market," would "inevitably" lead to totalitarianism...

...In the years of misery immediately following the war, and after the generous belief in a complete reconstruction of Europe under progressive-socialist auspices had been dashed, the Soviet Union presented for many French intellectuals a beacon of hope...