France's Young Come of Age
JR, JOHN E. MCCARTHY
ASENSEOF EQUILIBRIUM France's Young Come of Age BY JOHN E.McCARTHY JR. Paris Every generation is special, and the one now coming of age in France is no exception. Since 1968, when students in...
...Bernard HenrwLe-vy, 29, author of the best-selling attack on Marxism, Barbarism With a Human Face, says of the Socialists: "Their vocabulary abounds in exquisite chastity that would be funny if it were not tragic...
...Thus a young woman who severely criticized French life also said of the PCF: "It does not offer a solution to the real problems in France...
...For him and his friends back home, he reported, Martin Luther King has been an inspiration...
...mism into France's structurally frozen political system...
...We have realized that our own solutions are inadequate...
...as the custodian of the civil rights tradition, whatever its imperfections...
...They are naturally sterile, passive and impotent because to say History is not always to make it...
...Quite the contrary...
...Interestingly, the United States is held in higher esteem by sizeable number of young African immigrants in France...
...Being functionaries, they suffer their fate by a strange incapacity to say, to do, to innovate...
...Nevertheless, for all the diversity, there is undeniably a new maturity in the air and this may augur well for France in the coming years...
...They seem, rather, to be waiting and thinking about their own and France's future within a more traditional framework...
...they cannot appreciate, moreover, the nature of the competition between the Democrats and the Republicans, thinking it a mere agreement not to take domestic issues very seriously...
...A young insurance salesman, for instance, worries that President Valery Giscard d'Estaing is not given the support needed to govern with any authority...
...Such generalizations, always hazardous, are especially dangerous in the case of the French, whose differing social levels, philosophies and traditions have given them a fragmented character...
...For while it is much appreciated, it is regarded with ambivalence...
...Since 1968, when students in the Parisian district set off one of the most serious crises of the Fifth Republic, the young in school, looking for a job or beginning a career have not faced war, depression, or the imminent political succession of a Communist Party that is an avowed enemy of the state...
...The most serious of these, in their eyes, are unemployment (at 5.5 per cent, low by our standards), the labyrinthine educational setup and the stagnant social structure...
...It's unscrupulous and is not interested in freedom...
...There can, of course, be no simple summation of the outlook and aspirations of the young here...
...A Leftist economics student feels that the grievances of those who demonstrated in 1968 have not been treated and that students are still ignored despite the increasing pressures upon them...
...They realized at that time that such an act would have been impossible in its idealism and its radicalism...
...I saw the movie Coming Home and I hated the U.S...
...A native of Cameroon who has been studying here for the past 10 years wanted to know about the civil rights movement...
...It's a threatening period...
...For the most part, though, the discontent remains unar-ticulated—and untreated: One young writer told me: "We simply don't know where this feeling is going to take us...
...Two things, however, appear certain...
...Because you are involved does not mean that we automatically feel the same...
...Issues of this kind affect their lives most directly, of course, and they speak with urgency about having to adapt to a system they find less than perfect...
...Misconceptions about America, it should be noted, are widespread among the youth in France, strongly contributing to the ambivalence the U.S...
...But that period was marred by polemics and extremism, neither of which is any longer indulged in...
...America's foreign policy comes in for the heaviest criticism...
...for being able to reexamine itself in a way France cannot...
...Although many among today's young are alienated and most see a pressing need for reform, they have not permitted themselves the luxury of a foolproof ideology, either of the Left or the Right...
...Perhaps this is what accounts for the remarkable sense of equilibrium I noticed in my travels among them—an equilibrium that may contribute much to solving the problems plaguing France today...
...Since the complaints were just—the need for educational reform, the aloofness of the Gaullist regime—it planted the seed of the honest desire for reform that is growing today...
...for Vietnam," one young man said...
...A recent graduate of the University of Nanterre put it as follows: "The events of 1968 changed the way of thinking in France, and allowed society to begin to evolve...
...After undermining the student movement in 1968 and, early this year, attempting to save itself at the expense of its electoral alliance with the Socialist Party in the national elections, the French Communist Party (PCF) in particular has lost its appeal as an alternative...
...We view many of the issues they consider important, like Eurocommunism and the problems between Greece and Turkey, as nothing more than an imposition of their own values on our own...
...the young French are simply too concerned with gaining a sense of perspective...
...When the Americans on their high horse tell us that a certain event is important, we habitually react in the opposite spirit...
...Isn't that high comedy...
...arouses in them...
...It wants power...
...Using Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as a symbol of victimization, they warn that all modern states are capable of producing a totalitarian system...
...My friend became furious, saying that such things rest en famiile, and rightly so, because French political parties are interested in higher principles...
...I nearly lost alaw-studenl friend discussing these matters...
...politics, for instance, as a sign of our abundant wealth...
...First, unlike Italy and Germany, there is little prospect of terrorism flourishing here...
...The grievances are not new...
...Many people travelled to countries in the third world to find that there is no such thing as a Utopian society, there are no ready answers...
...It is not surprising that they have rarely taken a political initiative...
...An electoral gain is always an 'advance' or a 'progress' of popular forces...
...They have, in short, grown up in a period of relative calm and stability...
...Like many others, he had thought that the influence of the American Communist Party corresponded to that of its counterpart in France...
...I explained that although the role of opposing parties is a given in our system, that does not imply the absence of conflict...
...The general feeling about the Socialist Party, which grew to become the largest on the Left during the 1970s, is that in trying to be all things to all people it has lost its sense of spirit and its humanistic vision...
...They interpret the relative calm of U.S...
...Second, the United States is not their model...
...As the writer told me: "In 1968 when the government was in crisis, the youth was anticipating what it would be like to implement their ideas...
...many of them were voiced by the generation of the '60s...
...We do not want to be influenced by America's cultural, economic and military power, no matter how much we like it...
...An 18-year-old girl working in a boutique fears losing her job and says the government does not care about such matters...
...A student voiced the opinion of many when he said: "We don't think the same way about foreign events as Americans do...
...More immediately, these writers claim that Western European society is directionless, causing man's spirit to drift aimlessly as well...
...And from his many questions about the current status of black Americans it would appear that European blacks still regard the U.S...
...Indeed, young people believe that all the parties have discredited themselves and are incapable of injecting dynaJohn E. McCarthy 3k., a new contributor, spent this summer working for the Paris bureau of Newsweek magazine...
...Then I realized that France has never produced a film about the Algerian war and I loved theU.S...
...Because of them, students and other young people began to have an effect on French life for the first time...
...They were a failure, yet they acted as a watershed for very serious grievances to be expressed...
...And a young architect said of Jean Ellenstein, the prominent Communist intellectual whose recent criticism of the party has resulted in his banishment from the PCF newspaper, L 'Hu-manite: "This guy has been a Stalinist for 30 years and now suddenly he's a libertarian...
...He was surprised to learn that Angela Davis is not a leading figure for black Americans...
...I suggested further that the tacit decision last year by all the French parties not to push for an investigation into the murder of a national representative would not have happened in the U.S...
...Levy is only one of a number of young intellectuals who have gained prominence in the past two years by criticizing the established political forces...
Vol. 61 • September 1978 • No. 18
