REFLECTIONS

...A strand of hair...

...Slowly the screen began to fill with a computer-graphic drawing of the winner's face...

...Abroad he is frequently placed in the party's right wing: a fifty-year-old economist who is suspicious of central planning and lukewarm in his enthusiasm for simple industrial nationalization...

...The difference is that while the children of the American Left grew up to see Ronald Reagan, Strom Thurmond, and the former head of the CIA in power, the French revolutionaries of 1968 are now signing up to run the ministries of state...

...Then I went to some of the party meetings, and I discovered a kind of church with this huge, horrible bureaucracy...

...Mit-ter-rand...

...A foreign workers' hostel in Vi-try was literally bulldozed.away by a gang of thugs led by local Communist officials...

...And so and so and so, went the cafe chatter in pre-election Paris...

...La Revolution Moleculaire, some of the aging communards call it—a kind of interpersonal revolution through which the people of Gavi's generation attempt to build their own revolutionary pockets within the larger body of France...

...Michel Jobert, the idiosyncratic left-wing Gaullist and former foreign minister, as Minister of Foreign Trade, and Gaston Defferre, the former perennial mayor of Marseilles, as Minister of Interior, a position which will enable him to pursue his life-long ambition to break Paris's control of centralized national planning and administration...

...Exasperated, he quit...

...We are still alienated from the dominant capitalist ideology...

...From that moment forward, on to the Bastille, where a hundred thousand people danced through the streets under a thunderstorm, to the eventual Socialist landslide in the National Assembly election, there was something profoundly new in France...

...But what did keep on, what actually grew was a cultural movement that expressed many of the values from '68...

...And national Party Secretary Georges Marchais applauded it all...

...one town council denied French blacks public housing space...

...They.speak of an informal "net" through which committed radicals are building a new kind of life from the ground up...

...That new spirit, an electricity in the air unlike anything seen since May 1968, may be the most promising element of the newly Socialist France, more important even than the concrete programs of the new regime...

...Not only has it broken the spell of cynicism: It at long last offers the prospect of infusing the extraordinary energy of the 1968 New Left generation into a political party with roots more than a hundred years deep...

...It's not that we've abandoned the economic fight, but that we have another fight to make as well...

...During the siege of May 1968, it was the hard-line Communist Party that betrayed the students, joined forces with the government, and thereby broke the general strike which could have brought down the government...

...Since the early '70s people on the Left were always trying to make new political campaigns, to find a new model...

...But we also see politics as the recon-quest of personality...

...At year's end he took part in a national party meeting...

...Jean-Marie Petrau, a candidate for the Assembly from a Paris suburb, had been one of the party's bright young men...

...When I was a Maoist," said Robert Maggiori, a teacher in suburban Paris, "in my head was Mao Tse-tung...

...TEN, NINE, EIGHT...

...A political movement always has to find some kind of references, but the references did not follow any more...

...But to show actual heartfelt enthusiasm for the old Socialist, for Mitterrand the great apologist of the Algerian war...

...over and over and over...

...It's really dead here now...

...On the other hand, until seven years ago he was the leader of the Partie Socialist Unisie, the largest of the militant parties from the 1960s, and he is a strong environmentalist, a proponent of worker management , and an ally of rank-and-file radicals in the CFDT...

...Ridiculous...

...There has never been much love between the New Left of the 1960s and the Communist Party, a disenchantment which has roots that are both ideological and historical...

...It wasn't until '68 that I discovered communism in the streets...

...That is not to say we've lost track of the larger political terrain...

...But the strategy failed...

...To these gauchos of 1968, he seemed hardly better than Hubert Humphrey did to the American movement, a man whom they could support only in the privacy of the ballot box...

...A balding head...

...Having arisen from near-oblivion as an ally of the radical Catholic workers in the Confederation Francais et Democratique du Travail (CFDT)—France's second-largest labor syndicate—the Socialist Party had also become the only national political institution to win the cautious support of the radicals of 1968...

...Whatever we thought we were doing ten years ago, it's gone...

...It is as though there was a new spirit sleeping beneath our fatigue and we've just woken up to find it," said Michel Contat, the writer, filmmaker, and former collaborator of Jean-Paul Sartre...

...The object had been to win working-class support by playing on workers' anxieties over unemployment and their residual resentment against foreign guest workers—all of it designed to reverse declining membership in the Party and the falling rolls of the Communist Confederation General du Travail (CGT), the largest labor syndicate in France...

...Of course, they were all voting for Mitterrand...

...another refused to issue permits for construction of an Islamic cultural center...

...But it was the Communist Party's unprecedented attacks on Africans, blacks, and foreign workers during the last year— set against a strict adherence to the Soviet line on Afghanistan—that brought some leftists to denounce it as a right-wing mass movement...

...Others remained in the party before giving up on it...

...That's why the movement now is more and more a cultural movement...

...In the end, Mitterrand offered them four minor cabinet posts—from a total of forty-four—but at the same time forced the Communist leadership to consume a feast of crow by signing a demand for Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and nonintervention in Poland, a 180-degree reversal of previous positions...

...Things were not as our illusions wished them to be...

...For the first time in forty years, the discussion of what socialism can mean in a modern, developed Western nation is wide open, free both of the Soviet shadow and of the strident gauchist ideology which routinely romanticized Third World revolutionary regimes—all this at a time when the European economy is extremely precarious, when unemployment is rising, when the shadow of nuclear Armageddon grows darker daily, and when most of the old political institutions seem morally bankrupt...

...In the National Assembly elections the Communist delegates dropped from eighty-six to forty-three...

...Winning only 15 per cent of the vote in the presidential election, Marchais made the worst showing for the Party in more than forty years...

...He holds a secondary post as minister of development in the Mitterrand cabinet, but his dual role as a highly respected economist and as a voice of the "new forces" provides him power beyond his post...

...Then, ever cautious, he hedged it by making a second bet on Mitterrand, to be paid off with dinner at an elegant two-star restaurant...

...Seconds to go, and an actual countdown was under way...

...The devastating non-performance of the French Communist Party in the spring elections also played a critical role in the resurgent optimism on the Left...

...I was active in the youth groups...

...The Socialist reponse has been a political eclecticism which has permitted Mitterrand to appoint Regis Debray, the one-time companion of Che Guevara, as his personal foreign policy adviser...

...They tried to find it in Portugal, they tried to find it at [the workers' strike at] Lip, they tried to find it in the spiritual movement, in Iran, always to find the old response...

...The ideas of the French cultural Left may not seem especially new in the United States, where women's rights, gay rights, environmentalism, and neighborhood control have dominated the movement for almost a decade...

...Unable to force their way into the new cabinet, the Communists, until recently the senior party of the French Left, were reduced to begging for a spot in the government...

...Now I have my wife, my friends, my children, my coworkers...

...People on the Left are finding a new way of looking at the world," remarked Philip Gavi, an editor at the daily Liberation who in the early 1970s wrote a book with Sartre entitled One Has Reason to Revolt...

...More important, however, was the role of Michel Ro-card, who last year challenged Mitterrand for the party's presidential nomination...

...Then something began to break...

...The beginnings of a forehead, next the eyebrows and then a tumultuous outbreak clapping, shouting, "Mit-ter-rand...

...It is that cultural movement, Gavi believes, which has re-ignited the radical impulse, which has in turn infected the Socialist Party, expanded it, and forced it to deal more creatively with the problems of French society, from the quality of food to homosexual rights to nuclear power...

...Her liberation lies in internalizing all those things, and in the people around her internalizing them...

...party leaders, without evidence, denounced North Africans as drug runners...

...What they will accomplish is anybody's guess, but the possibilities are delicious...

...My friend Jean-Jacques had bet sixteen bottles of Moet-Chandon with Jean-Louis (both of them former militants from 1968) on Giscard...

...Even as early as the end of May 1968, the party's aging grand homme, Pierre Mendes-France, had supported the striking students...

...Even up to the night of the election itself the tone of Paris resembled the clubhouse at the Kentucky Derby more than it did the imminent arrival of the lutte finale...

...Rocard is something of a wild card in the Socialist camp—which is probably why he enjoys so much support among the younger generation of radicals...

...And Mitterrand, well, he's not so much, but that's all we have right now...

...The net effect was the near-elimination of the Communist Party's ability to direct the dialogue over the future of French socialism...

...Mit-ter-rand...

...One friend, a former fervent Maoist from the early 1970s, now a respectable editor of her own list in a large publishing firm, told me flatly a few days before the election, "Forget Europe...

...He was secretary of his own cell in 1973 and in the same year was made a delegate to the World Youth Festival in Berlin...

...This spring, as the youngest candidate in France, he-ran as an independent...

...Jean-Baptist, now thirty-one and an editor in a large publishing house, recalls his own youthful experiences: "I guess I was something of an armchair Marxist...

...We try to discover the reality of the typist in the secretarial pool, to find out what's important in her life, how she feels about her kids, about her debts, how that capitalist system destroys her identity in all the little ways...

...If that coalition succeeds, much of the credit will go to the bland M. Mitterrand...

...each time he raised an idea, he was told politely, "It will be studied...

...I think it's all on your side of the Atlantic now...

...The genius of Francois Mitterrand, personally a tired retread from the Fourth Republic of the 1950s, was to promote himself both as la force tranquille and as the vehicle of real change: His socialism would be the means through which the French could invent a new future for themselves precisely because it had become an eclectic home for those who sought to decentralize state power while they wished to socialize the economy, who supported the Central American revolutionaries while they denounced the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan and its harassment of Poland, who were determined to preserve the ancient tradition of French culture while they were committed to a revolution of human relationships according to the manifestos of 1968...

...At least that was the spirit that seemed to pervade Paris up until the final moments of the election as friends gathered together to watch the victory announcement on television...

...Frank Browning is an associate editor at Pacific News Service in San Francisco...

...The question for the movement is how she can change her relation to her boss, to her husband, to her children, and how they must change in the same process...

...Ironically, most of the Maoist militants had first discovered radical politics in the Communist Party's youth organizations, and it was there that they learned to revile the Communist Party...