Response to Commenters

Some comments on a previous thread concerning Hollande's speech at the Vel' d'Hiv' prompted this response from me, which I think is worth posting here, where it will be more visible:

Yes, Roosevelt loathed de Gaulle, because in his eyes de Gaulle was a fantasist who took himself to be "France." A bit like Joan of Arc hearing voices, or an asylum inmate imagining that he is Napoleon. And you can see the thing from Roosevelt's point of view. In one discussion, Roosevelt and Churchill were laying plans for a major operation, talking about deployments of troops, fleets, airplanes. De Gaulle piped up: "France will contribute 1,000," he said. Roosevelt wondered, "One thousand what? Tanks? Divisions? Ships?" So he put the question to de Gaulle. The answer: "One thousand men." To a leader thinking in terms of hundreds of thousands of troops, this may well have seemed ... risible.

But Roosevelt underestimated the importance of symbolism, which was de Gaulle's forte, and when circumstances are right, symbolism can turn into real force. It has been estimated that the French Resistance was worth several divisions to the Allies. But all this is quite irrelevant to Hollande's apology. Unlike Boris, I find the Franco-Israeli historian's contribution quite small-minded. True, de Gaulle and the Resistance did not have the fate of French Jewry in mind (nor did Roosevelt, for that matter). But it's quite right of Hollande, who is the leader of all the French, not just French Jewry, to recall, while apologizing for France's failings, that de Gaulle and the Resistance did save France's honor by refusing to capitulate. What made Hollande's speech so splendid was that he didn't feel the need to choose: either I am a Gaullist or I am a defender of the Jews. No: he said forthrightly that one can speak of the Jews and still pay homage to de Gaulle. I wish that Henri Guaino, now joined by Bruno Le Maire, who really should know better, understood this.

(I will have to rethink my previous praise for Le Maire. Both his interview with Mediapart and his statement on the Hollande speech were extremely disappointing. I gave him credit for more intelligence.)

Hollande at the Vel' d'Hiv'

François Hollande gave a superb speech, one of his best, at the site of the Vel' d'Hiv', where Jews rounded up by the French police in 1942 were taken to await deportation. Giving full credit to Jacques Chirac, who was the first French president to acknowledge the responsibility of the French state--the French Republic--in this crime, he went even further than Chirac had.

Some people on the right are not happy, however. Henri Guaino is one of them. From Guaino we hear the familiar refrain that Vichy was not France, that the true France was in London with de Gaulle, etc. etc. One can understand the argument at a symbolic level, however feeble the actual adherence to the idea, let alone the reality, of resistance in 1942. What is not acceptable, however, is Guaino's further suggestion that Hollande's acceptance of responsibility in the name of France is motivated by an alleged affinity between Hollande and the collaborators of the 1940s:

Peut-être que M. Hollande se sent plus proche de la France des notables apeurés qui se sont précipités à Vichy après l'armistice? Ce n'est pas ma France.

This is a slur on anyone whose reading of history is different from Guaino's. It is tantamount to an allegation that anyone who does not believe that l'Appel du 18 juin exonerates France--the state and the nation--of all responsibility for what happened during World War II is "objectively" a collaborationist. Such a charge is unworthy of M. Guaino, who is a student of history. He should know better, however commendable his commitment to the Man of June 18.

Merkollande

Angela Merkel and François Hollande managed to project a little actual or simulated warmth yesterday as they celebrated 50 years of Franco-German entente. It's nice to see them thinking about something other than the euro for a change. The economic imbroglio, which has pushed all other aspects of the European project into the shadows for the past two years, was not allowed to obscure the importance of a partnership built on the ruins of three disastrous wars. The importance, and even the sacred memory: the two leaders joined in a service at the cathedral of Reims, and thus far I haven't heard any snippy remarks about violations of republican laïcité. For after all the cathedral itself, though a potent symbol of the French monarchy, was also a victim of one of those wars and therefore quite a suitable lieu de mémoire for a republican Catholic to meet with a German Protestant.

Now back to the euro. Because peace is not enough to ensure stability, as both leaders know well.

Polanski Compares Himself to Dreyfus

My cousin Marc isn't buying it.

Voter Nul

It seems that in 1898, "voter nul" had a special meaning: in that year, a white ass named Nul was entered as a candidate and paraded through the streets of Paris.

Kapil Takes on Mélenchon

My blogging confrère Arun Kapil dislikes Jean-Luc Mélenchon a good deal more than I do, and I don't like him much. I know that Mélenchon has many supporters among my readers, and they will no doubt be incensed by Arun's post. They should nevertheless read it. He states his position forthrightly and invites debate. I found this passage noteworthy:

The political scientist Marc Lazar said recently that the Communist party in France may be all but dead but that a communist culture still exists on the French left, and that Jean-Luc Mélenchon has achieved the singular feat in his presidential campaign of awakening this culture and giving it a unified political expression.

I would take some issue with Lazar's formulation. Mélenchon revives one aspect of French Communist culture,  but that culture was far more than Georges Marchais's sneering attitude toward journalists, which Mélenchon shares. Communist culture would never have survived as long as it did if it hadn't provided a structure of support, solidarity, and community for its adherents. Mélenchon has resurrected the cult of personality, the combative spirit, and a good deal of the nasty invective as well as the high-flown historical rhetoric of that earlier period, but one might speculate that a part of the enthusiasm he has aroused comes from a yearning for a restoration of that community on the part of a mostly older group of leftists who found in May 68 a solidarity that no "modern" political party--and certainly not the French Socialist Party--can supply.

To my mind, such solidarity, which grew naturally out of the experience of the shop floor when labor was regimented in battalions and treated like cannon fodder, is not a natural part of today's society. It can flare up briefly in specific settings: the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s bore some, though not all, of its earmarks. And since I was a part of that counterculture, I can attest to its attractions. But such fellow-feeling, however pleasurable, is not a sound basis for the kinds of political decisions that we face today. It leads almost invariably to a division of society into friends and enemies--a distinction that is the basis of the thought of Carl Schmitt more than that of Karl Marx. It is no longer possible to wish that "demain l'Internationale sera le genre humain." We have become too diverse to believe that any one class of society is called by its very nature and essence to become "the universal class." And for me that is the essence of Mélenchon's error and the illusion under which his supporters labor.

The rest I leave to Arun, along with the responsibility for his remarks.

Resistance Again

See my previous post on the prégnance of the resistance theme in French political culture. After Mélenchon, Sarkozy:

Au terme d'une semaine qui a vu sa dynamique de campagne s'affaisser, devant une marée de drapeaux bleu, blanc, rouge, le challenger Sarkozy, qui jouait là une de ses dernières cartes avant le premier tour, en a donc appelé, dans de grandes envolées, à la "résistance" du peuple français. Multipliant les références historiques, le président-candidat a appelé les quelques dizaines de milliers de personnes présentes (100 000 selon Jean-François Copé, 50 000 officieusement), à "renouveler l'exploit qu'ont accompli les hommes de l'après-guerre".

Raymond Aubrac, 1914-2012

Raymond Aubrac, whose name is synonymous with the French resistance, died yesterday at 98. What I didn't know about him is that he spent a year at my alma mater, MIT.

Mr. Aubrac was born Raymond Samuel on July 31, 1914, to shopkeepers in Vesoul, France. He studied engineering and law in France and received a scholarship to continue his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard for a year.

One should also be aware of the "counter-myth" concerning Aubrac's role in the Resistance and its aftermath. I will probably be dead before the true story of the high politics of the Resistance is fully sorted out, but there are many points that remain murky. Younger readers may also be interested to learn of Raymond Aubrac's role in the Vietnam War peace negotiations, in which he served as a "back channel" between Henry Kissinger and Ho Chi Minh.