The Sophist: a Portrait
Domenach, Jean-Marie
A soft, round face with a dull and banal expression; a mouth out of which come resounding but hollow words. Haven't I already come across him on some subway platform or in his home town of...
...Since he himself lacks anything singular in his personality, he does not cause any fright in a party whose intellectually superior members are hated by the rest with all the strength residing in a petty bourgeois soul...
...there is, in fact, much of Stalinism in this prudent diligence, this destruction of intelligence and systematic purging of the party apparatus...
...The base of his support rests upon the powerful federations of the north with their worker militants who hate the Communists for having misled them and often having brutally fought them...
...He represents both an obscure sort of courage and social security, retirement for the aged and the struggle against tyranny...
...still victor...
...His own history is lost in that of his people's sufferings and in his own rise: inspector of secondary schools, English language teacher...
...Strictly speaking, this man has no history of his own...
...He is the Unknown Soldier of French socialism...
...As a matter of fact, anyone can understand simply by reacting that incredible collection, Bilan et perspectives socialistes, which is made up of three or four speeches compiled by him, constituting the sum and substance of our hero...
...We allow ourselves to be seduced...
...During his stay in the government, it was he who took the place of the General when de Gaulle left to visit our noble provincial cities and the still nobler cities beyond our shores...
...Shortly before his death Zhdanov confided to Marshal Tito's envoy that, "We have more confidence in Mollet than in Nenni...
...In April, 1958 Mollet once more steered a course to the left, even going so far as to give up Robert Lacoste [the draconic Socialist governor of Algeria.] But once more an event stopped him: the coup d'etat of May 13 for which he must bear the prime responsibility...
...And so effectively that, whether he is shifting from the right or left, he always ends up on top...
...a mouth out of which come resounding but hollow words...
...They covered him with spittle in Algiers, but he emerged, shining and with dis tinction...
...A democratic epoch: apo theosis of the banal, triumph of the anonymous—so he is...
...He possesses in addition a sort of ardent cordiality, a ring of sincerity which attaches his listeners to him and causes his enemies to hesitate...
...Mollet is omnipotent for the very same reasons which usually led to his being I86 underestimated...
...He most assuredly has an air of pathos about him...
...His policy was a victorious one and, indeed, he would have carried us as far as Suez if the Americans hadn't stepped in...
...Translated by STANLEY PLASTRIK...
...He is the opposite of a symbol...
...He was one of the people, a war orphan, a ward of the nation...
...What is the source of this extraordinary faculty for imposing his personal whims and fancies upon a great party with democratic traditions...
...His kingdom is solidly planted in the ranks of the left, among the people...
...He speaks with that mixture of reason and sensibility characteristic of democratic orators...
...Because he is no phantom come from nowhere who will quickly fade away...
...Starting from general postulates of the left (social and economic progress, "independence" of the individual, etc...
...he spoke of making the Algerian colonialists disgorge their plunder...
...For the first time the socialist group pushed him aside and voted, in his absence, in favor of an intransigent declaration...
...Republics pass, Mollet remains...
...Elsewhere, the secretary-general patiently stuffed the party hierarchy with his creatures: here, a mayor is in Mollet's debt because of his silence about some scandalous affair...
...A soft, round face with a dull and banal expression...
...Now he is sure that nobody will attempt to remake party doctrine and so much the worse for his two sons-in-law who have just joined the party and to whom he confessed he had nothing to give them to read...
...outwardly, all is consistent with their essence...
...HE CONDUCTED the 1956 election struggle along pacifist lines...
...as an apostle of resistance to personal power he furtively negotiated with General de Gaulle...
...He who incarnated that fatal spiritual corruption and the cheap political lie of the Fourth Republic was the hope of the Fifth even before there was a Fifth...
...Having no doctrine in a party which long ago lost its own, but able to put on display a handful of recollections and a dozen quotations from Alain, Blum and Bracke, he gives an assurance of remaining faithful to that indefinable something which all French socialists cherish in common...
...Depreux has gone, Savary .. . 13 deputies along with several sections...
...The party's last theoretician, Andre Philip, he had expelled...
...It was wrong...
...He is the end product of socialism's debauchery, that degradation of the people ferreted out, perhaps unjustly but prophetically, by Peguy in Jaures...
...And I understood...
...The result was a brief victory of the Republican Front and a government in which Mollet put Mendes-France in second place ("he isn't one of us, but he's the best of them...
...The intellectuals of the Revue Socialiste were forced to give way before him...
...Then, if we retrace his argument we discover the lie to be everywhere...
...Mollet is still there...
...of "halting a blind and imbecilic repression...
...he is Everyman...
...Thus he was a minister in the Pflimlin cabinet, a future Premier in a Guy Mollet government and a future second minister of a de Gaulle government...
...When I left the meeting one of the left-wing minority leaders said to me, "Now can you understand why we have so much trouble at our conventions...
...During the debacle the SFIO minority was sure that it had at last decapitated their Secretary-General...
...there, a functionary whose skirt-chasing ac tivities are known to Mollet...
...STILL AND ALL, such maneuvers would have been ineffective if Guy Mollet did not possess much more than tactical skill...
...This lends him whatever historic dimension he may have...
...His speeches feed upon the Beautiful, the Good, the True...
...And all this at one and the same moment...
...This is how he becomes miraculously a man of the right, carrying out its policy in the name of liberal and generous sentiments...
...Between Mollet and a large segment of our population—formerly socialists and republicans—there exists a deep understanding...
...More than the fanatics and the conspirators he should make us shudder...
...But he and his men remain...
...Mollet was then only the leader of the "Marxist," leftist tendency within the SFIO [French Socialist Party], but he already knew how to inspire that scornful credit which statesmen—usually to their regret— grant politicians whom they judge sufficiently shrewd to deceive their own followers but not quite sharp enough to trick them...
...His enemies swore he was lost...
...Mollet arrives at conclusions held by the right (struggle against any form of nationalization overseas, hatred of all intellectuals, support for NeoGaullism etc...
...I have listened to him...
...the tremendous shock of last May came close to...
...Ten times he was given up for lost, but ten times he came back...
...A top soldier too, for—happily—we live in an epoch in which corporals are raised to dictators, adjutants be come marshals and trade unionists, governors...
...a policy so victorious that no one dares ask why it failed...
...in still another section his foster-sister lays down the law...
...destroying him, but left him, finally, on the very peaks...
...It is the secret of the Sophist as Socrates revealed it...
...He did whatever he had to do...
...the secretary of another federation is a teacher in Arras, happy in his silence...
...Mollet served to assure a continuity between the Fourth and Fifth Republics...
...Mollet's secret is to speak a language attuned to a people who refuse to hear the truth...
...Then came February 6th, 1956, when Guy Mollet, surrendering to a howling mob, abandoned both Algeria and his government to the will of the army...
...We are reminded of Stalin's mathematical ascent...
...Without once mentioning February 6, 1956, Mollet is capable of expounding his entire policy and concluding by telling us how proud he is of himself...
...And so he became the leader, totally, inexorably...
...Guy Mollet is the creature of our decomposed hopes...
...Three months later Mollet dragged a "yes" out of a reluctant Socialist Party congress by covering up this motion with another favoring negotiations over Algeria...
...He took Daniel Mayer in, put him in his pocket and then lifted his political theses from him...
...Sickened by lies, betrayed by so many revolutionists and absorbed now in the general rush toward bourgeois prosperity, they want a nice, comfortable, progressive security, retirement without any difficulties, a Bismarckian socialism tinted with a good democratic conscience...
...This is the moment when he became, simultaneously, three men: as minister in the Pflimlin government he intrigued to bring about its downfall and to have himself placed at the head of a government of national unity...
...No, I must be wrong...
...Haven't I already come across him on some subway platform or in his home town of Arras...
...Among the socialists he was another militant, with the resistance another resister, with the soldiers, a soldier...
...These speeches are concerned neither with essence nor reality but only with the lowest form of usefulness...
...he senses keenly what these people want...
...if we do not reflect that between his words and his attitude, his conclusion and the reality, there is no connection, we are lost...
...It was the minority which was forced to leave...
Vol. 6 • April 1959 • No. 2
