French intellectuals and the left

...Then the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, coupled with the 1981 declaration of martial law in Poland, and the crushing by Polish communists of the Solidarity movement, appeared to tarnish irremediably Marxism's image among French intellectuals...

...After two months in prison, Bove was released and immediately staged a back-to-the-land, counter-globalization festival/protest in the Larzac region of southern France...

...Many of these facts first came to light in 1994 when Pierre Pean's biography of Mitterrand, line Jeunesse francaise, was published...

...The Communists registered an anemic 3.3 percent...

...and • Pierre Manent, a noted political philosopher and disciple of Leo Strauss, who has written a number of books that criticize the insufficiencies of political liberalism...

...Between 1981 and 2000, there were only two years, from 1995 to 1997, in which the Socialists failed to hold the office of president or prime minister...

...Left-leaning intellectuals soon concluded that the anti-totalitarian intellectual consensus failed to provide a program for the 1990s...

...For a long time, Mitterrand's knack for electoral success allowed him to camouflage the PS's ideological confusion...

...Bové has also been criticized by Doctors Without Borders founder and former PS minister of health Bernard Kouchner—the PS's most popular and trusted political figure...

...The man who was once one of the Fifth Republic's leading critics (in 1964 he penned a scathing diatribe against the "presidential republic" called The Permanent Coup d'Etat) ultimately turned its institutions to his own advantage...

...Europe," or a push for greater European economic and political integration, was the cover under which Mitterrand pursued these reforms...

...By the time of Mitterrand's exit from politics in 1995, the country suffered from a structural unemployment rate that hovered around 12 per cent...

...The Socialists had to cope with the depressing fact that only 14 percent of its active members were under forty, and adherents over sixty years old make up 40 percent of the party...

...At the same time, many French maitres-a-penser (master thinkers) sought to belittle the controversy as much ado about nothing...

...After the 1993 electoral debacle, he revived the party through a novel "gauche plurielle" ("plural left"), that is, a coalition of the PS with the Communists, Greens, and Jean-Pierre Chevenement's anti-European Citizen's Movement...

...By the end it seemed that his sole passion was for power...

...In Lindenberg's view, these figures were indirectly responsible for the 2002 embarrassment...

...It is worth noting that the French press commonly compares the April 21 debacle—without a trace of irony—to the September 11 terror attacks...

...The Epinay program had proclaimed that "socialist transformation" sought "not to manage a system but to replace it with another"' Yet, in a January 1984 television appearance Mitterrand declared that "the French are beginning to understand: it is the firm that creates wealth, it is the firm that creates employment, it is the firm that decides our standard of living and our place in the world hierarchy...

...standing up to the xenophobic populism of Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front...

...According to Kouchner, Bove's knee-jerk populism and antiparliamentarism are more reminiscent of the tactics and orientation of the nativist political right than the left...

...The French far left has few parallels elsewhere in Europe, and it chastised the PS as "social liberal...

...This allowed the PS to fashion its 1972 programme commun, or alliance with the then powerful and ever Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF...

...They have tried to show in a deliberately provocative manner that the "Other" is not always the loveable and well-intentioned soul he or she is made out to be by anti-racist pedagogy...

...As Jospin's presidential aspirations collapsed, commentators proclaimed the end of the era that began with Mitterrand's 1971 Epinay-sur-Seine program and crested with his election to the presidency ten years later...

...Havel, Sakharov, and Walesa replaced Marx, Lenin, and Mao in the pantheon...

...Nor did Bové enhance his credibility as a left-wing advocate when, returning from a visit to the Middle East in spring 2002, he announced on French radio that the Mossad (the Israeli Secret Service) was behind the recent, nationwide attacks on French synagogues and other Jewish sites...

...These included ex-prime ministers Laurent Fabius and Michel Rocard, former European Commission president Jacques Delors (who eventually decided not to seek the party leadership), as well as Jospin...

...Bove achieved fame in 1999 when he was arrested for bulldozing a McDonald's restaurant under construction in the southern town of Millau...

...The Socialists learned that an individual nation-state could not isolate itself from global economic trends...

...In the post—World War II decades the term "French exceptionalism" signified the major role the PCF played in national political life— a role that markedly contrasted to other Western European democracies (excepting Italy...

...The fallout from the "Lindenberg debate" was dissected by journalists throughout Europe, in keeping with the (risky) maxim that Parisian intellectual strife is inherently newsworthy...

...Viewed through a politicalintellectual lens, it appears to be an attempt to settle scores with left-wing intellectuals who positioned themselves to the left of the established left...

...Between 1997 and 2002, joblessness declined from 12.4 percent to 9.1 percent...

...Although Mitterrand arrived in power with a platform that promised full employment and a break with capitalism, France soon underwent draconian austerity measures, a wave of privatizations, and a "break with socialism...

...In 1993 legislative elections, with Mitterrand as president, the Gaullists won five hundred National Assembly seats to a mere fifty for the Socialists...

...Mitterrand reoriented the French left around a neo-Keynesian program of radical, state-driven reforms (expansion of the public sector, widespread nationalizations, income redistribution...

...They demonstrated that his "anti-capitalist" sentiments derived not from socialist ideas but from the right-wing Catholic milieu he frequented as a youth...

...He remained wedded rhetorically and ideologically to redistributive ideals and paid lip service to antiglobalization rhetoric...

...according to reliable accounts, twice that POLITICS ABROAD many showed up...

...He ceaselessly reinvented himself...

...Call to Order reads like a hastily conceived book...

...Kouchner went so far as to compare Bové's anti-globalization orientation to that of Pierre Poujade, who during the 1950s led a short-lived smallholder's revolt against the Fourth Republic...

...For several weeks, Le Monde, Le Figaro, and Le Nouvel Observateur, opened their pages to Lindenberg's detractors and defenders...

...Revelations of Pol Pot's "killing fields" were interpreted against the background of the "Solzhenitsyn effect...

...The common program with the Communists failed to survive the first two years of Mitterrand's presidency (1981-1983...

...Lindenberg thinks that this sort of politics has deprived French socialists of badly needed supPOLITICS ABROAD port on the left...

...In French Philosophy of the 1960s (cowritten with Alain Renaut) and other works, Ferry pointedly criticized hedonistic individu8 n DISSENT / Winter 2004 alism as an unintended outcome of the May '68 student revolt...

...But, thanks to a magisterial political blunder by Chirac—a premature call for new legislative elections—the PS, now led by Jospin, recovered and became the majority party once again in 1997...

...He does maintain that, wittingly or unwittingly, they undermined the democratic-egalitarian political consensus that has been actively fostered during the two decades during which the Socialist Party dominated French politics...

...It seems to have exposed the divisions that, in recent years, have rent the French intellectual left...

...Before his change, Mitterrand was personally rewarded by Petain with Vichy's highest honor, the francisque...

...Flush with success, Bové, alluding to the unprecedented heat wave (which, according to the latest statistics, was responsible for some 15,000 deaths), warned of a "red-hot" September (un Septembre brulant...

...Still, it appears to have scored a direct hit against its targets...

...He disparages the PS as neoliberals and perceives the Jospin ministry as a little more than a Trojan Horse for the International Monetary Fund and backers of the European Monetary Union...

...Jospin moved to the Matignon (the prime minister's residence...

...Some commentators called it the revenge of French socialism's "Marxist superego...

...Mitterand's PS com20 n DISSENT / Winter 2004 rades were shocked to learn that their leader had also maintained close personal ties with Rene Bousquet...

...One reason why Lindenberg's search for historical antecedents seems tenuous is that figures such as Ferry, Gauchet, and ex-Guevarista Regis Debray remain convinced republicans...

...In a recent outburst, he has also referred to Islam as "the stupidest religion of all" ("La religion la plus con"), an offense for which he was sued for religious defamation by two of France's leading Islamic organizations...

...Following a stint as a prisoner of war, he served as an administrator under Marshal Philippe Petain before joining the Resistance circa 1942...

...And in January 2003, Esprit— Lindenberg's journalistic base—published a sizeable dossier harshly critical of his book's main tenets...

...In Lindenberg's view, Etienne Balibar, Alain Badiou, and Jacques Ranciere are stridently dismissive of French socialism's genuine achievements: maintaining the minimal trappings of the welfare state despite formidable international pressures to "liberalize...

...And, if so, is it worth much time and energy to expose their alleged misdeeds...

...From a political standpoint, Pean's revelations were indispensable in understanding Mitterrand...

...In his very early years—back in the 1930s—Mitterrand flirted with far-right politics, attending meetings of the conspiratorial, anti-republican Cagoule ("monk's cowl...

...When his two-term presidency ended in 1995, he seemed more of an enigma than ever...

...But this anti-totalitarian consensus began to unravel during the massive December 1995 22 n DISSENT / Winter 2004 public sector strikes protesting attempts to restructure France's generous pension system...

...In 1997 Jospin became prime minister under President Jacques Chirac, and it soon became clear that the Socialist response to EU-decreed, anti-inflationary austerity measures differed little from the strategies proposed by the Gaullists...

...They are, he believes, neo-Spenglerian prophets of decline, who reprise the lamentations of counterrevolutionary Kulturkritik, denouncing the failings of mass society in the mandarin idiom of the German 1920s...

...This ex-Vichy police commissioner had been responsible for the infamous July 1942 deportation of French Jews...

...The book's author was Daniel Lindenberg, a historian and frequent contributor to the left-liberal monthly Esprit...

...Hence, although each has chastised Socialist Party orthodoxies— often from the left—to tar them with the "new reactionary" label as Lindenberg does defies common sense...

...In June 2003 he was arrested again, this time for destroying stocks of genetically modified rice...

...Two Trotskyist candidates attracted 10 percent...

...Today, some aging gauchistes appear to be suffering from political memory loss or they missed the point...

...The contradictions of the Mitterrand era finally caught up with the PS in April 2002...

...It was little consolation for the PS that Chirac's 19.88 percent total was the worst ever for an incumbent president...

...Journals leaning to social liberalism such as Esprit supported the conservative government's retrenchment policy, whereas Marxisant intellectuals such as the late Pierre Bourdieu cast their lot with striking workers and chastised globalization...

...Yet because the "anti—anti-racist" idiom in question transpires in a largely literary discourse, it is hard to know just how seriously to take the "offending" speech acts...

...All three authors tried to unsettle the commonplaces of French "anti-racism," which, since the 1980s, have served as a left-liberal mainstay against the chauvinism of the National Front...

...As historian Serge Berstein has aptly remarked, "All that was left in the wreckage were liberal policies: market forces, free competition, monetary orthodoxy, a balanced budget without a balance of payments deficit, and an unregulated labor market...

...He has now announced his intention to resign as spokesman for the Confederation Paysanne...

...Mitterrand realized that because the PCF was still attracting close to 20 percent of the French vote he would never win the presidency without its support...

...After the McDonald's incident one of Bove's longtime allies, ex-Situationist René Riesel, demonstratively broke with him, claiming the Confederation Paysanne spokesman had succumbed to "bovémania...

...Now the socialists are in dire political straits—easy prey for the Gaullists, whose grip on power seems, for the foreseeable future, unchallengeable...

...He identifies a trio of former followers of the late communist philosopher Louis Althusser as the main offenders...

...The key to understanding this tempest is in the book's subtitle...

...This novelist is the author of The Elementary Particles, a merciless indictment of the narcissistic excesses and unbridled hedonism supposedly practiced by the ex-68ers who have dominated French cultural and intellectual life for the past three decades...

...More recently, Ferry has been a noted champion of "republicanism," a political ethos that privileges the well-being of the nation over individual rights and liberties...

...pOSTSCRIPT: During the summer of 2003, just when it appeared that things couldn't get any worse for the PS, another challenge arose from the anti-globalization movement led by Jose Bove, spokesman for the Confederation Paysanne (Farmers' Confederation...

...Many savor the irony that Bove, the antiglobalization movement's poster child, has become an international media celebrity and thus one of global society's primary beneficiaries...

...In the eighteen months since the 2002 defeat, however, no clear leader has emerged...

...Above all, he reduced unemployment...

...The best way to combat the excesses of globalization is not via regression to the homilies of left-wing sectarianism but by extending logics of democratization that rely on human rights as an indispensable safeguard against the dangers of authoritarian political relapse...

...But there was a volteface in the 1970s...

...DISSENT / Winter 2004 n 23...

...What had he supported as a "socialist...

...Jospin also kept his distance from the "third way" approach proclaimed by fellow European socialists such as Britain's Tony Blair and DISSENT / Winter 2004 n 21 POLITICS ABROAD Germany's Gerhard Schroder...

...These criticisms seem to have taken their toll on Bov...

...In part, the explanation is simple: voters on the left who wished to protest globalization or the tyranny of markets opted for one of the Trotskyists over Jospin...

...SO HE REVERSED policy, switching from Keynesianism to monetarism...

...The PS electoral base is rapidly reaching the age of retirement, and new, younger militants are hard to find...

...A new mantra was heard: human rights is not a politics...

...Mitterrand's political origins were one complicating factor...

...Lindenberg seems to have overplayed his hand by drawing parallels between contemporary anti-democratic disaffection and two previous epochs: the 1890s, which saw the emergence of a vituperative, anti-Republican and anti-Semitic right led by Action Francaise founder Charles Maurras, and the 1930s, in which "nonconformist" intellectuals and politicos crossed over from "left" to "right" in significant numbers, thereby preparing the ideological terrain for Vichy...

...The left had completely lost its identity...

...It weighs in at fewer than a hundred pages...

...Lindenberg thinks these figures are united in an unholy alliance against France's reigning democratic political consensus...

...The reigning consensus suggests that none of them is presidentiable...

...But the party's 2002 thrashing left party stalwarts without cover...

...Martin's Press, 1998), p. 51...

...Still, he also pursued strategies designed to enhance France's global competitiveness, and this may have proved crucial in his undoing.' Jospin was outflanked on the far left...

...In the 1970s that ethos provided a badly needed exit strategy from all varieties of left-wing dogmatism...

...THIS BRINGS US back to Lindenberg's acrimonious book...

...His revulsion for the PS—whose exhibit at the Larzac gathering was pointedly "dismantled" by antiglobalization activists— is well known...

...Le Pen won 16.9 percent and the PS won 16.2 percent of the vote...

...Nevertheless, the controversy reveals fault lines within the French left and reflects the disorientation that arose following Le Pen's "April surprise" in the 2002 elections...

...Luc Ferry, a philosopher and now minister of education under the current Chirac-Raffarin regime...

...RICHARD WOLIN teaches European intellectual history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York...

...In the eyes of many, these fissures were in part responsible for the Socialist Party's disastrous performance in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections, in which Lionel Jospin ran behind Le Pen (who, in the ensuing runoff, was handily bested by Jacques Chirac...

...Few would deny that Lindenberg provoked an extremely confused debate...

...And so the Mitterrand government paid dearly for its initial orgy of state spending and POLITICS ABROAD nationalizations...

...The ex-Althusserians belittle these gains in stereotypically Marxist fashion as an ideological ruse that masks bourgeois interest, in this case, the globalization agenda...

...Among "literary reactionaries" such as Houllebecq, Muray, and Dantec, it is fashionable to question left-wing "political correctness...

...First he was a right-wing nationalist, then a Vichyite, then a resistant, then a centrist, then a unifier of the left, then an Olympian president, and finally an ardent Europeanist...

...Marcel Gauchet, co-editor of the influential quarterly Le Debat and the author of Democracy Against Itself, a collection of essays criticizing the corrosive effects of democratic individualism...

...In the mean time, Chevenement, the Greens, and the Communists all ran hard against the PS in the first round of presidential voting, playing directly into the hands of the National Front...

...Above all, the Lindenberg affair reveals the existence of overlapping crises: a crisis of the French left that overlaps with an intellectual crisis and a general crisis of European socialism...

...One of Lindenberg's motivations in condemning the "new reactionaries"— both "right" and "left"—was to defend the honor of the twenty years of Socialists in government...

...Lindenberg doesn't propose that the "new reactionaries" actually conspired against the Fifth Republic's left-liberal political culture...

...A "modernization" drive aimed to "streamline" the public sector, despite the fact that civil servants represented the PS's leading electoral constituency...

...FOLLOWING THE 1993 setback, several outstanding, even charismatic, candidates positioned themselves to be Mitterrand's heir...

...Although they are less known in the Anglo-Saxon world, Muray and Dantec, like Houllebecq, have expressed a similar revulsion against left-wing "political correctness," in various forms such as antiracism and cultural populism...

...The consequence was an identity crisis about the very meaning of "socialism...

...and stressing "human rights" as the indispensable moralpolitical basis of the expanding European Union...

...This may be true, but a slogan like this seriously underestimated the beneficial change that resulted from acceptance of the anti-totalitarian ethos in the first place...

...Do they share a common ideology...

...2. H. Machin and V. Wright, Economic Policy and PolicyMaking under the Mitterrand Presidency 1981 -1984 (London: Frances Pinter, 1985), p. 3. 3. Serge Berstein, "The Crisis of the Left and the Return of the Republican Model," in The Mitterrand Years, p. 82...

...In this way, political responsibility for unpopular economic measures could be blamed on Brussels (the seat of the European Commission...

...Those who sought to mount a fresh approach, such as the PS's Rocardian wing—advocates of workers' self-management and market socialism— remained marginalized (despite the fact that Rocard served as prime minister from 1988-1991...

...Although the media-savvy Bové has gained considerable notoriety for his neo-Luddite antics, he has been reprimanded recently by fellow protestors for being too camera-friendly...

...One irony of the PS's defeat was that Jospin had a relatively good record in office...

...These facts allow us to make more sense of Mitterrand's dizzying political opportunism...

...When he refashioned a moribund French Socialist Party at the Epinay Congress in 1971, marking the birth of the "modern" PS, Mitterrand opportunistically crossed over politically from a small center-republican party...

...But French socialism's radical change, of course, was not accompanied by any serious philosophical or doctrinal adjustments...

...Emphasis added.] In short, the PS now seemed to pursue a benign version of the marketization strategies that in Anglo-Saxon countries were associated with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan...

...Who are the "New Reactionaries...

...Party rhetoric continued to reflect the values represented by the heyday of European social democracy—the so-called "thirty glorious years" from 1945-1975—despite the fact that socialism's traditional class basis had altered radically...

...Jospin's defeat left Mitterrand's Socialist DISSENT / Winter 2004 n 19 POLITICS ABROAD Party (PS) in tatters...

...I. M. Maclean, ed., The Mitterrand Years (NewYork: St...

...Among Lindenberg's antagonists are • literary enfant terrible Michel Houllebecq...

...His new book, The Seduction of Unreason: the Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press this spring...

...novelists Philippe Muray and Michel Dantec...

...Relatively bland figures such as Francois Hollande, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and Pierre Moscovici, all of whom convey competence rather than charisma, have jockeyed for power...

...Last spring's party congress at Dijon seems to have resolved few issues...

...He pushed through tough new measures to ensure electoral parity for PS women...

...They also attack what they see as left-wing libidinal licentiousness bordering on social irresponsibility...

...For the moment, he represents more of a thorn in the side of the ailing PS than a serious political threat...

...Jospin restored integrity to the Socialist leadership (there were many scandals in the later Mitterrand years) and instituted a series of progressive economic reforms: the thirty-five hour work week (at no loss of pay) as well as an ambitious youth employment program...

...Lindenberg complains that this antiliberal idiom has flourished not only among the anti'68 literati, but also among leftists...

...Marxism dominated left-leaning French intellectuals...

...Organizers had anticipated a hundred thousand protesters...

...EVERTHELESS, this overheated debate attests to the fact that the book touched .\ a raw nerve...

...The franc was devalued three times in Mitterrand's first two years...

...His fourteen-year "reign"—an "imperial presidency" if ever there was one—lasted longer than that of any French head of state since the Second Empire of Louis Bonaparte...

...4. See Philip H. Gordon and Sophie Meunier, The French Challenge: Adapting to Globalization (Washington, D.C., The Brookings Institution, 2001...

...The publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1974 undermined the French romance with communism...

...More generally, however, the Lindenberg debate suggests a breakdown of the "anti-totalitarian political consensus" that, for two decades, functioned as the reigning paradigm among French intellectuals...

...The 1971 PS platform stressed a "rupture with capitalism...

...The collapse of communism finally undid socialist dirigisme...

...Indeed, by the end of 1981 inflation was rampant, reaching 14.1 percent...