Groovy
ALAN, RAY
Groovy Ten years after its last experiment with barricades, and three months after the Left's latest electoral defeat, France seems settled in a familiar groove. The French say of their society...
...Like the words of the Marseillaise (with its promise of furrows irrigated with "impure blood"), the slogans and manifestos no longer mean much, but even Right-wing town halls have Liberie, Egalite, Fra-ternite on the wall...
...Although Left-wing attitudes are perennially modish in broad sectors of its labor unions, educational system and press, France remains one of Europe's most conservative countries...
...And, as if ashamed of their record, they often change labels: The Gaullists, for example, have fought elections under five different names...
...They have called themselves popular republicans, new republicans, independents, Gaullists, radicals and a dozen other things, but never conservatives...
...Hence the initial success of that pseudorevolutionary upheaval in the mu«y spring of 1968...
...Either alone or with the assistance of the moderate Left or reactionary Right, they have ruled France continuously for more than 40 years—though rarely under their true colors...
...Yet, despite their electoral strength, French conservatives often give the impression of lacking the courage of their convictions...
...Fragments of revolutionary history and rhetoric flap around in every Frenchman's mental backyard, even if he is a royalist...
...Hence, I think, that conservative shiftiness, and the symbolic, if unequal, tussle between heart and wallet...
...The French say of their society that it wears its heart on the left and its wallet on the right: In other words, it tends to talk radical and vote for stability...
...Part of the explanation may be that France's society and basic institutions derive, however tenuously, from the French Revolution—a bourgeois happening, but still a revolution...
Vol. 61 • July 1978 • No. 15
