My MA thesis is temporarily and spatially about the French Third Republic, but it is really about liberals. My question is simple: why are liberals like that? “Like what?,” you ask (really no one asks but I appreciate your indulgence), but on an instinctual level most of us on the left know what I mean when I say “like that.”
What I mean is why are they convinced of their own radicalism? Why do they think they – “KHive,” Buttigieg, etc. supporters – are just as far left as a “Bernie bro,” or a DSAer, or Lenin and Mao? What is so radical about Pell Grant recipients and means-tested student loan forgiveness? Why do they invoke the radical legacy of the 14th amendment after informing the nation that the “fucking president” will not be put on trial?
Jacobin’s recent article about Bernard-Henri Lévy was informative. It seems that most French philosophers went through a Maoist phase and Lévy was no different. And, like many ‘68ers his radicalism gave way to “practical politics” and defenses of what is here today against the “excesses” of radical utopianism. The French establishment, it turns out, is filled to the brim with former radicals.
But France has been like that for a long time. It’s called sinistrisme. The event I’m writing about took place in 1914 when the seating in the Chamber of Deputies was rearranged so that the socialist party could finally sit on the chamber’s left while conservative parties were forced to sit on the right and acknowledge their own conservativism, with a lot of complaints and renamed parties along the way. These were the Kamala Harrises and Joe Bidens of their time. They were once radical, why should they have to give up their seats!
And they really were once radical. Kind of. Most of the deputies came of age in the Second Empire and cut their teeth against that authoritarian regime. It’s what came next that matters.
The question that is always asked about the Third Republic is how it survived. I liked Sanford Elwitt’s response: it didn’t, it thrived. Elwitt was a classic Marxist and spent a good portion of his career in Little Egypt at SIU-Carbondale. He’s dead now, but I spent a good amount of time searching for him before I came across the discovery. Most historians of the Third Republic are dead. Just like interest is in the republic.
It’s a modern burned-over district, the messiah has been found and proclaimed a dozen times already, and no one wants to hear it anymore. The current trend is the July Monarchy, a lot of energy now goes into defending the legacy of Guizot, Marx’s boogeyman. That liberals are now defending a regime that was somehow less democratic regime than the Second Empire is beyond me, but they keep saying “look, the franchise was expanded by 100,000 votes!,” just don’t ask about the other seven million.
Elwitt’s answer was that these former radicals are a part of a bourgeois conspiracy to divorce the republic from the social revolution. And against a regime that saw political republicanism and socialism as equally dangerous threats, they did, indeed, look a little radical. The election of a majority royalist National Assembly in 1871 and Their’s slaughter of the Parisian left solidified republican beliefs. Theirs – an old minister of Guizot’s – was going to bring back the Bourbon monarchy and he (and his successor) was only barely stopped in the Seize Mai crisis.
This happened 37 years before my story. How many boomer 68ers still believe in their own radicalism?
Lévy still believes in his own radicalism. It’s been his “…stocked-in-trade since the 1970s, to denounce “power” and “politics” with one hand while defending the existing political order with the other.” But he must still believe in his own radicalism, most liberals do.
This is what makes Macron such a unique figure in French politics. He actively rejects the identity. Mitterrand formed an electoral alliance with the Communist Party and the Unified Socialist Party was an important element of the Socialist Party’s legislative elections. This is what I like about French politics, that even the conservatives have been through a left. And that’s what makes Macron so heartbreaking. He was never there. French presidents have a soul that they discard when given the chance. I wonder if Macron ever had one. He is unique in French politics, a modern Guizot (and supported by the same historians).
One of the stock explanations for why the Third Republic “survived” is that it was a compromise. Equally disagreeable to everyone. It was the first French constitution that did not require an oath of loyalty to itself (indeed, that is because it did not exist) but it was also a form of government that was designed by the right and progressively taken over by increasingly left-wing factions. It was a constant lurch towards the left, a painfully slow one, but it moved nonetheless. I said that conservative French presidents were on a left with reason. It’s proof of these movements’ successes.
But the Third Republic’s constitution empowered the rural right and De Gaulle’s constitution is no different. And, like the Third Republic, it is a system of government that the left has been using to lurch towards power. The idea that Mitterrand could have ever been the president of France was shocking, before him the title was a monopoly of the right. Hollande was the same and even Macron, the bastard child of the socialist party’s neoliberal wing, represented something akin to the neoliberal left.
But a neoliberal left that is honest with itself. Macron did not have a Maoist phase, there is no need to read Marx. He is the purest incarnation of capitalist realism and the death of sinistrisme. Jean-Marie Le Pen is often cited as the death of the concept, but I disagree. There were always right-wing challengers to the status quo – Boulanger and Petain come to mind – but the concept endured. Macron asks, in typical neoliberal fashion, why does France need these eccentricities? They can no longer be afforded. He is the neoliberal center, why should he pretend otherwise?
This is the difference between the US and France, and proof of the latter’s “Americanization.” The Third Republic was founded in living memory of 1848. 1848 was within living memory of Waterloo and the great French Revolution. Mitterrand’s election was facilitated by those who had participated in 1968. Older sympathizers had seen Algeria and Vichy. Before them the Great War. And before them, the Paris Commune and the foundation of the Third Republic. Marcon, born in 1977 sees nothing. In his eagerness for all things American he has tossed the country’s historical memory into the gutter and embraced America’s worst export, ignorance.
The French center and left both govern from the center but with constant reference to their very recent radical pasts. Do the Democrats? Nancy Pelosi – who attended JFK’s inauguration – does not harken back to a radical San Francisco. Joe Biden can only think about muscle cars and milkshakes, was there not a radical Delaware? The French historical memory runs deep, Americans cannot remember a scandal from more than a week ago. France’s political elite is discarding its historical memory while the Democrats, failing to remember the New Deal and with only a faint idea of what Reconstruction was, are trying, and failing, to invent a radical memory for themselves.
So why are liberals like that? You know, like that.
Signed,
Andrew (Pfannkuche)
Normal Thoughts 