The New Old World (32 page)

But no matter how crushing the evidence, the judiciary has so far been unable to put any significant politician behind bars. Chirac secured immunity from prosecution from a tame Constitutional Court, and is currently shielding Juppé; Mitterrand's foreign minister, Roland Dumas—himself a former member of the Court—has been acquitted after a trial, and Strauss-Kahn cleared even without one. Few French citizens can have much doubt that all these figures, and many more, have broken the law for political advantage, or—in the spirit of Giscard's diamonds—personal gain. But since Left and Right are equally implicated, and close ranks against any retribution, the venality of the political class is proof against consequences within the system. There is little moralizing strain in French culture, and less vocal indignation at corruption than in Italy. But this has not signified mere indifference. What it has fed is a deepening alienation from the elite running the country, and contempt for its revolving cast of office-holders.

Electoral abstention, rising to levels well above the EU average, has been one symptom of this disenchantment, though recently Britain under New Labour has beaten all comers. Another has been more distinctively, indeed famously—or infamously—French. From the mid-eighties onwards, the Front National attracted at least a tenth of the electorate, climbing to nearly 15 per cent for Le Pen in the presidential contest at the end of the decade. At the time, the size of this vote for an openly xenophobic
party, organized by veterans of the far Right, set France apart from any other European country. Widely thought to be fascist, the FN appeared a peculiar national stain, and potential threat to French democracy. What could explain such an extraordinary recidivism? In fact, the initial conditions for the FN's success were perfectly intelligible and local. No other European society had received such a large settler community from its colonial empire: a million
pieds-noirs
expelled from the Maghreb, with all the bitterness of exiles; and no other European society had received such a large influx of immigrants from the very zone once colonized: two and a half million
maghrébins
. That combination was always likely to release a political toxin.

The Front could also count, beyond its original base in the
pied-noir
communities, on pockets of nostalgia for Vichy—Tixier-Vignancour's voters in the fifties, a diminishing asset—or loyalty to the liturgy of Cardinal Lefèbvre. But the conditions of its real take-off lay elsewhere. Le Pen's electoral break-through came in 1984, a year after Mitterrand had abruptly jettisoned the social vision of the Common Programme and embraced orthodox monetarism. The neo-liberal turn of 1983 did not lead the Communist Party, which had four unimportant seats in the cabinet, to break with the government. Rather, as it would again under Jospin, it clung to the crumbs of office, regardless of the political cost of doing so, let alone considerations of principle. Its reward for adding to the follies of the Third Period those of the Popular Front—first, blind sectarianism in 1977–8, then feeble opportunism—was self-destruction, as more and more of its working-class electorate abandoned the Party. It was the gap created by the resulting compression of the political spectrum that gave the FN its chance, as it picked up increasing numbers of disgruntled voters in decaying proletarian suburbs and small towns. For many, the system of
la pensée unique
had left only this acrid alternative.

The arrogance and self-enclosure of the political class did the rest. Excluding the Front from any presence in the National Assembly by eliminating proportional representation, and shielding itself against any settlement of accounts with corruption, the establishment merely confirmed Le Pen's denunciations of it as a conspiracy of privilege, which he could deliver with an oratorical flair none of its suits could match. The more Left and Right united to treat the Front as a pariah, the more its appeal as an outsider to the system grew. Overt racism against Arab immigrants, and a somewhat more muffled anti-Semitism, took their place in its
repertoire alongside a generalized, raucous populism. The two stresses that eventually cracked liberal hegemony apart, the tension pitting multi-culturalism and republicanism against each other, and the resistance of opinion to the virtues of the market, were exactly the terrain on which it could flourish, at the most sensitive intersection between them.

The limits of the Front as a political phenomenon were at the same time always plain. Shunned by the Right, after initial furtive overtures by Chirac, and over-dependent on the personality of Le Pen, it lacked any professional cadre and never acquired administrative experience, vegetating between polls in a resentful sub-culture. Its brawling style at the hustings alarmed as much as it attracted. Above all, its main calling card—the immigrant issue—was inherently restrictive. The appeal of fascism between the wars had rested on massive social dislocation and the spectre of a revolutionary labour movement, a far cry from the tidy landscape of the Fifth Republic. Immigration is a minority phenomenon, virtually by definition, as war between the classes was not. In consequence, xenophobic responses to it, however ugly, have little power of political multiplication. Aron, who had witnessed the rise of Nazism in Germany and knew what he was talking about, understood this from the start, criticizing panicky over-estimations of the Front. In effect, from the mid-eighties onwards its electoral scores oscillated within a fixed range, never dropping much below a national average of 10 per cent and never rising above 15 per cent.

In 2000, the political system underwent its most significant change since the time of De Gaulle. Chirac and Jospin, each manoeuvring for advantage in the presidential elections of 2002, colluded to alter the term of the presidency from seven to five years, Giscard brokering the deal between them. Ostensibly, the aim of the change was to reduce the likelihood of ‘cohabitation'—possession of the Elysée and Matignon by rival parties, which had become increasingly frequent since 1986—and so give greater unity and efficiency to government, too often compromised by strains between president and prime minister. In fact, what the revision amounted to was a massive increase in the power of the presidency, promising a thorough-going personalization of the political system along American lines, since it was clear that if elections for the executive and the legislature were held in the same year, in France's highly centralized society, a victorious president would almost automatically always be able to create a tame majority for
himself in the National Assembly in the immediate wake of his own election—as had happened on every occasion since 1958. The result could only be to weaken a legislature already
fainéant
enough, and further accentuate that excess of executive power Furet had termed a national pathology. A referendum was held to ratify this reduction of checks and balances in the constitution. Just 25 per cent of the electorate turned out for it, of whom four-fifths voted for a change trumpeted by the establishment as a great step forward in French democracy, bringing it into line with advanced countries elsewhere.

But there was still a potential glitch. The existing electoral calendar required elections to the Assembly to be held by the end of March 2002, and the presidential election in April–May—so reversing the intended scheme of things, and risking that the vote for the legislature would determine that for the executive, rather than the other way round. Jospin, confident that he enjoyed the esteem of the electorate, rammed through an extension by three months of the life of the Assembly, to clear the way for conquest of the Elysée. Few self-interested constitutional manipulations have backfired so spectacularly.

In the spring of 2002, the campaign for the presidency starred Chirac and Jospin as leading candidates, running on platforms whose rhetoric was almost indistinguishable. When the results of the first round came in, dispersion of the vote of the
gauche plurielle—
Socialists, Communists, Greens and Left Radicals—between its constituent candidatures, all symbolic save the premier himself, knocked Jospin out of the contest with a humiliating 16.18 per cent of ballots cast, leaving Le Pen, with 195,000 votes more, to go through to the second round against Chirac, who himself got a miserable 19.88 per cent, a nadir for any incumbent president. Had the legislative elections been held first, Jospin's coalition would almost certainly have won—the combined Left vote he could have counted on, if the scores in April were an indication, was up to 10 per cent higher than that of the Right—and in its wake he would have taken the Elysée.

The most startling feature of the presidential poll, however, lay neither in the gross miscalculation of the PS, nor in the fact that Le Pen overtook Jospin. There was in fact no net increase in the combined vote of the far Right at all, compared with 1995.
³⁹
The
salient reality was the depth of popular antipathy to the political establishment as a whole. Far larger than the vote for any of the contestants was the number of abstentions and blank or invalid ballots—nearly 31 per cent. Another 10.4 of the electorate voted for rival Trotskyist candidates of the far Left; 4.2 for the cause of hunting, shooting and fishing. In all, nearly two out of three French voters rejected the stale menu of the consensus presented to them.

Establishment reaction was unanimous. What mattered was one apocalyptic fact. In the words of a typical pronouncement: ‘At eight o'clock on April 21, a mortified France and a stupefied world registered the cataclysm: Jean-Marie Le Pen had overtaken Lionel Jospin'.
⁴⁰
Everywhere hands were wrung in national shame. The media were flooded with editorials, articles, broadcasts, appeals explaining to the French that they faced the brown peril and must now rally as one to Chirac against it, if the Republic was to be saved. Youth demonstrated in the streets, the official Left rushed to the side of the president, even much of the far Left decided it was the moment of
no pasarán
, and they too must weigh in behind the candidate of the Right. Chirac—afraid he would be worsted in any argument with Le Pen, who would be sure to embarrass him by recounting past secret tractations between them—declined any television debate, and knowing the result was a foregone conclusion, scarcely bothered to campaign.

The second round duly gave him a majority of 82 per cent, worthy of a Mexican president in the hey-day of the PRI. On the Left Bank, his vote reached virtually Albanian heights. The media switched in the space of fifteen days from the hysterical to the ecstatic. The honour of France had been magnificently restored. After an incomparable demonstration of civic responsibility, the president could now set to work with a new sense of moral purpose, and the country hold its head high in the world again. Authoritative commentators observed that this was France's finest
hour since 1914, when the nation had closed ranks in a sacred union against another deadly enemy.

Actually, if an analogy were needed, the unanimity of 2002 was closer in spirit to that of Bordeaux in 1940, when the National Assembly of the Third Republic voted overwhelmingly to hand power to Pétain, convinced that this was a patriotic necessity to avert catastrophe. This time, of course, tragedy repeated itself as farce, since there was not even a trace of an emergency to warrant the consecration of Chirac. In the first round of the elections, the combined poll of the Right was already 75 per cent higher that of the FN and its split-off—a difference of more than four million votes; while given the lack of any major contrast in the ideas and policies of Chirac and Jospin, it was clear that many who had voted for the latter would switch to the former without prompting in the second round anyway. There was never the faintest chance of Le Pen winning the presidency. The frantic calls from the Left to rally behind Chirac were entirely supernumerary—merely serving to ensure that it was crushed in the legislative elections in June, when as a reward for its self-abasement the Right took the National Assembly with the largest majority in the history of the Fifth Republic, and Chirac acquired a plenitude of power he had never enjoyed before. It was a
journée des dupes
to remember.

The wild swings of the vote in this ideological whirligig—Chirac transmogrified from a symbol of futility and corruption, trusted by less than a seventh of the electorate, into an icon of national authority and responsibility in the blink of an eye—can be taken, however, as symptoms of an underlying pattern in the country's political culture. Under the Fifth Republic, the French have increasingly resisted collective organization. Today fewer than 2 per cent of the electorate are members of any political party, by far the lowest figure in the EU. More striking still is the extraordinarily low rate of unionization. Only some 7 to 8 per cent of the work-force are members of trade-unions, well below even the United States, where the comparable figure (still falling) is 11 per cent; let alone Denmark or Sweden, where trade-unions still account for two-thirds to three-quarters of the employed population. The tiny size of industrial and political organizations speaks, undoubtedly, of deep-rooted individualist traits in French culture and society, widely remarked on by natives and foreigners alike: sturdier in many ways than their
more celebrated American counterparts, because less subject to the pressures of moral conformity.

But the French aversion to conventional forms of civic association does not necessarily mean privatization. On the contrary, the paradox of this political culture is that the very low indices of permanent organization coexist with exceptional propensities for spontaneous combustion. Again and again, quite suddenly, formidable popular mobilizations can materialize out of nowhere. The great revolt of May–June 1968, still far the largest and most impressive demonstration of collective agency in post-war European history, is the emblematic modern example that no subsequent ruler of France has forgotten.