The New Old World (30 page)

In Britain, the early nineties saw the breakdown of Thatcher's rule and the passage to a less strident neo-liberal agenda, under the atonic stewardship of Major. In France, the trend was in the opposite direction: the dominance of a market-minded consensus reached its height in the early years of the second Mitterrand presidency. The gains of the front of opinion articulated by François Furet and his friends were there for all to see. France was finally delivered of its totalitarian temptations. The shades of the Revolution had been laid to rest. The Republic had found its feet in the safe ground of the Centre. Only one heritage of the past had yet to be thoroughly purged of its ambiguities: the Nation. This task fell to Pierre Nora. In his editorial on the tenth anniversary of
Le Débat
in 1990, Nora had hailed the ‘new cultural landscape' of the country, and within another couple of years, he completed his own monumental contribution to it. Originating in a seminar at the EHESS in 1978–80—the same conjuncture as
Le Débat
itself—the first volume of
Les lieux de mémoire
came out under his direction in 1984. By the time the last set appeared in 1992, the enterprise had swollen to seven volumes and some 5,600 pages, mustering six times as many contributors as the
Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française,
from a more ecumenical range of scholars. Its aim, Nora declared in his initial presentation of the project, was an inventory of all those realms of remembrance where French identity could be said to have symbolically crystallized.

Under this capacious heading, 127 essays—most of high quality—surveyed a bewildering pot-pourri of objects, ranging from such obvious items as the Tricolour, the Marseillaise and the Panthéon, through the forest, the generation and the firm, to conversation, the industrial age, and mediaeval lineages, not to
speak, obviously, of gastronomy, the vine and Descartes. What united them, Nora explained, was their status for his purposes: ‘unlike all the objects of history, realms of memory have no referent in reality'—they are ‘pure signs, that refer only to themselves'.
¹⁷
The post-modern flourish is not to be taken too seriously. For what these signs actually referred to were, variously, the Republic, the Nation or just Frenchness at large. But since these too were symbolic, the exploration of them that
Les lieux de mémoire
offered would be a history of France ‘to the second degree'—one concerned not with causes, actions or events, but rather effects and traces.

That did not mean it was less ambitious than its predecessors. The
Annales
had sought a total history, in reaction to the narrowness of traditional political narratives. But since symbols united material and cultural facts, and the ultimate truth of politics could well lie in its symbolic dimension, the study of realms of memory converted politics into the register of a history paradoxically more totalizing than the Annalism it might now be replacing.
¹⁸
What had made this possible was the abandonment of visions of the future as a controlling horizon for interpretations of the past, in favour of a consensual support for institutions of the present. At a time when the French were no longer willing to die for their country, they were ‘unanimous in discovering their interest and affection for it', in all the diversity of its manifold expressions. It was as if ‘France was ceasing to be a history that divides us to become a culture that unites us, a property the shared title to which is treated as a family inheritance'.
¹⁹
Escape from traditional forms of nationalism, such as that regrettable pair, Gaullism and Jacobinism, far from weakening sentiments of national belonging, had strengthened them as the French entered into the healing domains of common remembrance.
²⁰

Les lieux de mémoire
was an enormous critical and public
success, and in due course became the model for not a few imitations abroad. But it was always plain that it must count as one of the most patently ideological programmes in post-war historiography anywhere in the world. It was Renan, after all, who had famously defined a nation as much by what it had to forget—the slaughter of sixteenth-century Protestants and thirteenth-century Albigensians were his examples—as to remember: a caution it might have been thought all the more difficult to ignore a century later. Yet Nora could cheerfully introduce his enterprise with the words:

Even though tolerably well thought-out—in keeping with the required typology, the state of scientific knowledge of the questions, and the competences available to deal with them—the choice of subjects contains an element of the arbitrary. Let us accept it. Such complaisance in our favourite imaginaries undeniably involves a risk of intellectual regression and a return to that Gallocentrism which contemporary historiography fortunately endeavours to transcend. We should be aware of this, and on our guard against it. But for the moment, let us forget it [
sic
]. And let us wish, for this handful of fresh and joyous essays—soon to be followed by armfuls more—a first innocent reading.
²¹

The effect of these convenient protocols, as not a few Anglophone historians pointed out,
²²
was to repress memories, not just of social divisions, but even, largely, of such inescapable symbols of the political past—their monuments literally astride the nation's capital—as Napoleon and his nephew: figures presumably no longer relevant in the ‘decentralized, modern' France, at rest within the ‘pacific, plural' Europe celebrated by Nora. More widely, the entire imperial history of the country, from the Napoleonic conquests through the plunder of Algeria under the July Monarchy, to the seizure of Indochina in the Second Empire, and the vast African booty of the Third Republic, becomes a
non-lieu
at the bar of these bland recollections. Both Nora and Furet had been courageous critics of the Algerian War in their youth.
²³
But by the
time they came to embalm the nation thirty years later, each had eliminated virtually any reference to its external record from their retrospections. One would scarcely know, from Furet's history of the nineteenth century, that France had a colonial empire at all, let alone that his particular hero Jules Ferry was the Rhodes of the Third Republic. Nora's volumes reduce all these fateful exertions to an exhibition of tropical knick-knacks in Vincennes. What are the
lieux de mémoire
that fail to include Dienbienphu?

Wrapping up the project eight years later, Nora noted criticisms made of it, and sought to turn them by complaining that although conceived as a ‘counter-commemoration', his seven volumes had been integrated into a self-indulgent heritage culture, of whose vices he had always been well aware, but which would remain pervasive as long as France had not found a firm new footing in the world.
²⁴
This ingenious sophistry could not really conceal, after the fact, that the whole enterprise of
Les lieux de mémoire
was elegaic through and through: the antithesis of everything that Roland Barthes, no less fascinated by icons, but more concerned with a critical theory of them, had offered in
Mythologies,
deconstructing the emblems of
francité—
a coinage Nora at one point even borrows, divested of its spirit—with a biting irony remote from this erudition of patriotic appeasement, published with expressions of gratitude to the Ministry of Culture and Communications.
²⁵
All too plainly, the underlying aim of the project, from which it never departed, was the creation of a
union sucrée
in which the divisions and discords of French society would melt away in the fond rituals of post-modern remembrance.

The intellectual limitations of an undertaking are one thing. Its political efficacy is another. The orchestral programme of which
Nora and Furet were the lead conductors in these years is best described as the enthronement of liberalism as an all-encompassing paradigm of French public life. In this contemporary design they could draw on the legacy of the great French liberal thinkers of the early nineteenth century: above all Constant, Guizot and Tocqueville, whose works were waiting to be rediscovered and put to active modern use.
²⁶
This was not the least important labour of the anti-totalitarian front of the time, and good scholarly work resulted, in the service of constructing a perfectly legitimate pedigree. Still, there was an ironic contrast between forebears and descendants. Under the Restoration and the July Monarchy, France produced a body of liberal political thought substantially richer than England, let alone America in the same period. But as a political force, liberalism was incomparably weaker. The mishaps of its leading minds—the repeated contrast between noble ideas and shabby actions—were the symptom of that discrepancy: Constant the turncoat of the Hundred Days, Tocqueville the hangman of the Roman Republic, two champions of liberty who connived at successive Napoleonic tyrannies; Guizot the frigid mechanic of exclusion and repression, chased from the country amid universal reprobation. The discredit of such careers was one reason for the neglect that befell their writings after their deaths. But even in their own time, they never really caught the imagination of their contemporaries. Classical French liberalism was a fragile bloom, in ungrateful soil. A hundred and fifty years later, matters were very different. The comprehensive rehabilitation of liberal themes and attitudes that set in from the mid-1970s onwards produced no political thinkers to compare even to Aron. But what it lacked in original ideas, it more than made up for in organizational reach. The phrase
la pensée unique,
coined twenty years later—though like all such terms, involving an element of exaggeration—was not inaccurate as a gauge of its general dominance.

The international conjuncture, of course, formed a highly favourable environment for this turn: the global ascendancy of Anglo-American neo-liberalism offered a formidable backdrop to the French scene. But no other Western country saw quite so decisive an intellectual victory. The achievement was a national one, the fruit of a coordinated campaign waged with skill and
determination by Furet, Nora and their allies across two decades. It combined institutional penetration and ideological construction in a single enterprise, to define the acceptable meanings of the country's past and the permissible bounds of its present. Here, as nowhere else, history and politics interlocked in an integrated vision of the nation, projected across the expanse of public space. In this respect the Communist Party Historians Group in Britain, though its members were to be no less politically active, and produced much more innovative history, were tyros beside their French contemporaries. There has rarely been such a vivid illustration of just what Gramsci meant by hegemony. He would have been fascinated by every nook and cranny of
Les lieux de mémoire,
down to its entries on street-names, a favourite subject of his, or the local notary; and he would have admired the energy and imagination with which the legacy of the Jacobins, his heroes, was liquidated—feats of a ‘passive revolution' more effective than the original Restorations of the nineteenth century themselves, around which so much of his theory in the
Prison Notebooks
was built. As if on cue, indeed, Furet ended his career with an obituary of communism as the rule of capital was restored in Russia, closing the century's ‘socialist parenthesis'.

By comparison with the rest of Furet's work,
Le passé d'une illusion—
flirting with the ideas of Ernst Nolte in its linkage of Bolshevism to Nazism, topics with which he had little prior acquaintance—was a pot-boiler. Appearing in 1995, it rehearsed so many Cold War themes long after the event that some wits remarked it read like the intellectual equivalent of a demand for reimbursement of the Russian loan.
²⁷
But this in no way affected its success in France. Acclaimed as a masterpiece by the media, it was an immediate best-seller, marking the height of Furet's fame. With this sensational coping-stone in place, the arch of anti-totalitarian triumph seemed complete.

Nine months later, France was convulsed by the largest wave of strikes and demonstrations since 1968. The Juppé government, attempting under pressure from Brussels to push through a neo-liberal restructuring of social security arrangements, had
provoked such popular anger that much of the country was brought to a halt. The resulting political crisis lasted for six weeks and split the intellectual class down the middle. Virtually the entire anti-totalitarian coalition endorsed Juppé's plans as a much-needed initiative to modernize what had become an archaic system of welfare privilege. Ranged against it, for the first time a consistent alternative spectrum of opinion materialized. Led by Bourdieu and others, it defended the strikers against the government.

Politically speaking, the confrontation between the palace and the street ended with the complete defeat of the regime. Juppé was forced to withdraw his reforms. Chirac jettisoned Juppé. The electors punished Chirac by giving a majority to Jospin. Intellectually, the climate was never quite the same again. A few weeks later Furet, playing tennis at his country house, fell dead on the court. He had just been elected to the Académie française, but had not yet had time to don the green and gold, grip his sword and be received among the Immortals.

But well before the end he had begun to express misgivings. Certainly, Gaullism and Communism were for all practical purposes extinct. The Socialist Party had abandoned its absurd nationalizations, and the intelligentsia had renounced its Marxist delusions. The Republic of the Centre he wished for had come into being. But the political architect of this transformation, whose rule had coincided with the ideological victories of moderate liberalism, and in part depended on them, was François Mitterrand. Furet's judgement of him was severe. A genius of means, barren of ends, Mitterrand had indeed destroyed the PCF and forced the PS to accept the logic of the firm and the market. But he had also abused the spirit of the Constitution by installing the simulacrum of a royal court in the Elysée; he presided over a regime whose ‘intellectual electro-encephalogram is absolutely flat'; and he had signally failed to the rise to the world-historical occasion when Soviet Communism collapsed.
²⁸
It was impossible to feel any warmth for a presidency so cynical and void of ideas. Barre or Rocard, admired by the Fondation Saint-Simon, would have been preferable.