The New Old World (31 page)

Behind this disaffection, however, lay a deeper doubt about the direction that French public life was taking. Already by the late eighties, Furet had started to express reservations about
the discourse of human rights that was becoming ever more prominent in France, as elsewhere. Impeccably liberal though it might seem—it had, after all, been the
pièce de résistance
at the ideological banquet of the Bicentenary—the ideology of human rights did not amount to a politics. A contemporary surrogate for what had once been the ideals of socialism, it undermined the coherence of the nation as a form of collective being, and gave rise to inherently contradictory demands: the right to equality and the right to difference, proclaimed in the same breath. Its enthusiasts would do well to re-read what Marx had said about human rights.
²⁹
The increasing cult of them was narrowing the difference between French and American political life.

Closer acquaintance with the US sharpened rather than lessened these anxieties. Furet remained a staunch champion of the great power that had always been the bastion of the Free World. But from his observation post in Chicago, much of the scenery of Clinton's America was off-putting, if not disturbing. Racial integration had paradoxically undone older black communities, and left ghettoes of a sinister misery with few equals in Europe. Sexual equality was advancing in America (as it was in Europe, if mercifully without the same absurdities), and it would change democratic societies. But it would neither transform their nature nor produce any new man, or woman. Political correctness was a kind of academic aping of class struggle. Crossed with the excesses of a careerist feminism, it had left many university departments in conditions to which only an Aristophanes or Molière could do justice. Multi-culturalism, as often as not combined with what should be its opposite, American juridification of every issue, led inevitably to a slack relativism. In the desert of political ideas under another astute but mindless president, the peculiar liberal variant of utopia it represented was spreading.
³⁰

Furet's final reflections were darker still. His last text, completed just before he died, surveyed France in the aftermath of the elections called by Chirac that had unexpectedly given the PS a legislative majority—in his view, an almost incredible blunder by a politician he once thought had governed well. But Jospin offered little that was different from Juppé. Right and
Left were united in evading the real issues before the country: the construction of Europe; the tensions around immigration; the persistence of unemployment, which could only be reduced by cutting social spending. Under Mitterrand, French public life had become a ‘depressing spectacle', amid a general decomposition of parties and ideas. Now lies and impostures were the political norm, as voters demanded ever newer doses of demagogy, without believing in them, in a country that stubbornly ‘ignored the laws of the end of the century'.
³¹

What were these laws? Historically, the Left had tried to separate capitalism and democracy, but they formed a single history. Democracy had triumphed since 1989, and with it capital. But its victory was now tinged with malaise, for it was accompanied by an ever vaster disengagement of its citizens from public life. It was impossible to view that withdrawal without a certain melancholy. Once communism had fallen, the absence of any alternative ideal of society was draining politics of passion, without leading to any greater belief in the justice of the status quo. Capitalism was now the sole horizon of humanity, but the more it prevailed, the more detested it became. ‘This condition is too austere and contrary to the spirit of modern societies to last', Furet concluded. He ended in the spirit of Tocqueville, lucidly resigned to the probability of what he had resisted. ‘It might one day be necessary', he conceded, ‘to go beyond the horizon of capitalism, to go beyond the universe of the rich and poor'. For however difficult it was even to conceive of a society other than ours today, ‘democracy, by virtue of its existence, creates the need for a world beyond the bourgeoisie and beyond Capital'.
³²

Inadvertently, then, the passing of an illusion had itself been the source of a disappointment. Victor of the Cold War it might be, but actually existing capitalism was an uninspiring affair. It was understandable that utopian dreams of a life without it had not vanished. In his last historical essay, Furet even forgot himself so far as to write once again of the ‘revolutionary bourgeoisie' that had carried France out of the Ancien Régime, almost as if he now saw merit in the catechism he had so long denounced.
³³
Two
centuries later, the dénouement he wished for had come, but it lay like so much clinker in his hands. A liberal Midas was left staring at what he had wanted.

Posthumously, if there were two sources of Furet's final disarray, capitalism and the condition of his own country, it was to be the second that scattered his following. There had always been a tension within the new French liberalism between its political loyalty to America and its emotional attachments to France. Its project had envisaged an ideal union of the principles of the sister Republics of the Enlightenment. But
e pluribus unum
and ‘one and indivisible' are mottoes at war with each other. For liberals, what counted for more? An atomistic individualism with no logical stopping-place, breaking the nation into so many rival micro-cultures, whose unification must become ever more formal and fragile? Or a collective identity anchored in common obligations and stern institutions, holding the nation resolutely—but perhaps also oppressively—together?

It was over this dilemma that the anti-totalitarian front fell apart. The first skirmish occurred in the early eighties, when Bernard-Henri Lévy announced that there was a generic ‘French Ideology', stretching from Left to Right across the twentieth century, saturating the nation with anti-Semitism and crypto-fascism. This was too much for
Le Débat,
which demolished Lévy's blunders and enormities in two blistering pieces, one by Le Roy Ladurie and the other by Nora (‘un idéologue bien de chez nous'), rebuffing attempts to discredit the Republic in the name of the Jewish question.
³⁴
The next occasion for dispute was, predictably enough, posed by the Muslim question, with the first affair of the
foulards
, in the late eighties. Could head-scarves be worn in schools without undermining the principles of a common secular education established by the Third Republic? This time the split was more serious, pitting advocates of a tolerant multi-culturalism, American-style, against upholders of the classical republican norms of a citizen nation.

Eventually, simmering ill-feeling over these issues burst into the open. In 2002, Daniel Lindenberg, a historian close to
Esprit
, unloosed a violent broadside against the authoritarian integrism, hostility to human rights and contempt for multi-culturalism of so many former fellow-fighters for French liberalism—notable among them leading lights of
Le Débat
and
Commentaire
. Such tendencies represented a new
rappel à l'ordre,
the eternal slogan of reaction. Lindenberg's pamphlet, although a crude piece of work, recklessly amalgamating its various targets, not only received a warm welcome in
Le Monde
and
Libération.
It pointedly appeared in a collection edited by Furet's colleague Pierre Rosanvallon, fellow architect of the Fondation Saint-Simon and co-author of
La République du centre,
recently promoted—many eyebrows had been raised—to the Collège de France. This was the signal for virtual civil war in the liberal camp, with a standard Parisian flurry of rival open letters and manifestoes, as Gauchet and his friends hit back in
L'Express
and columns of the press closer to them. The disintegration of the comity of the late seventies was complete.
³⁵

By then, however, a much larger change in its position had occurred. Furet's misgivings at the upshot of modernization were a murmur against the background of more menacing sounds from the depths of the country. Among the masses, neo-liberalism
à la française
had not caught on. From 1983 onwards, when Mitterrand made the decisive turn towards the logic of financial markets, the French electorate had unfailingly rejected every government that administered this medicine to it. The pattern never varied. Under a Presidency of the Left, Fabius—the first Socialist premier to hail the new ‘culture of the firm'—was turned out in 1986; Chirac, who launched the first wave of privatizations for the Right, was rejected in 1988; Bérégovoy, Socialist pillar of the
franc fort,
was ousted in 1992; Balladur, personifying an Orleanist moderation in the pursuit of economic liberty, fell at the polls in 1995. Under a Presidency of the Right, Juppé—the boldest of these technocrats,
who attacked social provisions more directly—was first crippled by strikes and then driven from office in 1997; Jospin—who privatized more than all his predecessors put together—thought that after five self-satisfied years of government he had broken the rule, only to be routed in the elections of 2002. Today Raffarin, after two years of dogged attempts to take up where Juppé left off, has already lost control of every regional administration in the country save Alsace, and sunk lower in the opinion polls than any prime minister in the history of the Fifth Republic. In twenty years, seven governments, lasting an average of less than three years apiece. All devoted, with minor variations, to similar policies. Not one of them re-elected.

No other country in the West has seen such a level of disaffection with its political establishment. In part, this has been a function of the constitutional structure of the Fifth Republic, whose quasi-regal presidency with its (till yesterday) seven-year terms of office, has both encouraged and neutralized continual expressions of electoral ill-humour within an otherwise all too stable framework of power. Where the Fourth Republic combined instability of cabinets with rigidity of voting blocs, the Fifth has inverted the pattern, uniting apparently immovable policies with congenitally restless electors.
³⁶
Such restlessness has not just been a by-product of institutional over-protection. More and more plainly as the years went by, it reflected disbelief in the nostrums of neo-liberal reform that every government, Left or Right, unvaryingly proposed to its citizens.

These did not remain mere paper. Over twenty years, liberalization has changed the face of France. What it liberated was, first and foremost, financial markets. The capital value of the stock market tripled as a proportion of GNP. The number of share-holders in the population increased four times over. Two-thirds of the largest French companies are now wholly or partially privatized concerns. Foreign ownership of equity in French enterprises has risen from 10 per cent in the mid-eighties to nearly 44 per cent today—a higher figure than in the UK itself.
³⁷
The rolling impact of these transformations will be felt for years
to come. If they have not yet been accompanied by much rundown of the French systems of social provision, that has been due to caution more than conviction on the part of the country's rulers, aware of the dangers of provoking electoral anger, and willing to trade sops like the thirty-five-hour week for priorities like privatization. By Anglo-American standards, France remains an over-regulated and cosseted country, as the
Economist
and
Financial Times
never fail to remind their readers. But by French standards, it has made impressive strides towards more acceptable international norms.

Such progress, however, has done nothing to allay popular suspicion and dislike of Anglo-Saxon ideas about them. The nineties saw the runaway success of literature attacking the advent of a new unbridled capitalism, with one best-seller after another: Pierre Bourdieu's massive indictment of its social consequences in
La misère du monde
(1993); the novelist Viviane Forrester's impassioned tract
L'horreur économique
(1996); the weathercock Emmanuel Todd's
L'illusion économique
(1998), an onslaught against laissez-faire from an intellectual once an ardent warrior for the Free World. By the mid-nineties, the rising tide of disgust with neo-liberal doctrines was so evident among voters that Chirac himself, seeking election in 1995, made the centre-piece of his campaign denunciation of
la pensée unique
and the fractured society it had created. When—like all his predecessors—he then readopted it in office, the result was, almost overnight, the industrial tremors that shook Juppé down. Looking around amid the débris, a chronicler at
Le Débat
concluded gloomily: ‘The liberal graft has not taken'.
³⁸

But in the divorce between official policies and popular feelings there was another element as well, more social than political. Since De Gaulle, the rulers of the Fifth Republic have become the most hermetic governing caste in the West. The degree of social power concentrated in a single, tiny institution producing an integrated political, administrative and business elite is, indeed, probably without equal anywhere in the world. The ENA accepts only 100 to 120 students a year—in all about five thousand persons since its foundation, out of a population of over fifty million. But these not only dominate the top rungs of the bureaucracy and the management of the largest companies, but furnish the core of the political class itself. Giscard, Fabius, Chirac, Rocard,
Balladur, Juppé and Jospin are all
énarques;
as were eleven out of seventeen ministers in the last Socialist government; both main rivals, Strauss-Kahn and Hollande, for Jospin's succession on the Left; not to speak of Chirac's dauphin on the Right, Dominique de Villepin, recently foreign and now interior minister.

The inbreeding of this oligarchy has inevitably spawned pervasive corruption. On the one hand, the practice of
pantouflage—
high functionaries gliding noiselessly from administration to business and politics, or back again—gives many an opportunity for diversion of public, or private, funds to partisan purposes. On the other, since the main political parties lack any significant mass memberships, they have long depended on milking budgets and trafficking favours to finance their operations. The result is the morass of jobbery that has, no doubt only partially, come to light in recent years, of which Chirac's tenure as mayor of Paris has been the most flagrant example to come before the
juges d'instruction.