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La Fièvre de la Raison: Nationalism and the French Right

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Eugen Weber
Eugen Weber
Affiliation:
University of California
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Extract

An epigram coined under the Third Republic presents the political Frenchman as torn between the claims of his heart on the Left and of his pocketbook on the Right. At a time when a nationalistic policy in Algeria draws heavily on all pocketbooks this idea seems out of date: today a good section of the French public is trying to reconcile accepted attitudes with a new policy, and the old phraseology of the Left conceals less and less successfully an ideology of the Right. The trend is strengthened by transfusions of new blood from a colonial domain lost or endangered in the last few years; that is, by the arrival in metropolitan France of tens of thousands of politically active and actively resentful citizens from Indo-China, Morocco, Tunisia, impenitently expressing their disrespect for democratic values, their wartime sympathies for Pétain and Vichy, and their contempt for the traditional language of political conformity.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , July 1958 , pp. 560 - 578
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1958

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References

* This article was written before May 13, 1958, and its judgments refer to a regime that has recently put itself in suspended animation. There is, however, nothing to suggest that fresh faces or patterns of government have so far appeared which are succeeding in coping better than the old. Recent events merely emphasize the increasingly widespread acceptance, in resignation or relief, of authoritarian solutions to apparently insoluble difficulties and incoherences. But nothing has yet clarified the fortunes or position of the extreme Right that is my special concern. Nor was it ever my intention to prophesy; this is an attempt to analyze the past, not to predict the future.

1 See the speeches of Robert Lacoste, Max Lejeune, and even Guy Mollet at the Toulouse Congress; and Duverger, M., “Neo-Socialisme, 1957,” Le Monde hebdomadaire, Nos. 456 and 457 (July 1957).Google Scholar

2 Rivarol (January 10, 1957) printed the letter of a French Algerian student, “Pourquoi je suis devenu un salaud de fasciste,” ending: “En A.F.N. nous sommes nombreux qui ne demandons qu'a passer à l'action. Ce sera bientôt fait. Et avec vous je dis: Vive la France. Vive Pétain. Vive le Christ-Roi!” In Aurore (November 24, 1955) Jules Romains expressed premature regret at the disappearance of the rightwing Leagues he had opposed before the war; cf. also the sympathetic treatment that prewar Fascist activities receive in his Fils de Jerphanion (1956).

3 “L'Election partielle de la Première Circonscription de la Seine,” Revue française de science politique, VII, No. 2 (1957), pp. 271–312.

4 Hoffmann, S., Le Mouvement Poujade, Paris, 1956Google Scholar; Touchard, J., “Bibliographie et chronologie du Poujadisme,” Revue française de science politique, VI, No. 1 (1956), pp. 18–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weber, E., “Poujade and the Sickness of France,” Dissent, IV, No. 2 (1957), pp. 183–88.Google Scholar

5 This is where party labels and groupings (e.g., Front Républicain, Gauche Républicaine) are misleading, because they fail to show why an assembly where the representatives “of the Left” are in a majority should so consistently avoid the politics of the Left. We need a careful analysis of the parliamentary personnel, in terms of their voting and their tendencies, before we can discriminate among them. Such an analysis I cannot provide at this time or discover elsewhere.

6 The resemblance between the two men goes beyond their high competence and their talent for making enemies to the confusion they create in some minds concerning their adherence to Left or Right. To this question concerning Mendès-France, the French Institute of Public Opinion received the following answers (Sondages, No. 1, 1955. p. 37):

7 Author of the sad story of a young militiaman's fate after the Liberation, Le Petit Canard, Paris, 1955.

8 Express, June 20, 1953.

9 Aurore, May 6, 1949, on the Cabinet meeting of April 14; Journal Officiel, Débats, Chambre, February 7, 1950.

10 Ecrits de Paris, September 1957; Le Monde, January 18, 1957, “L'Armée s'inquiète.”

11 Le Monde hebdomadaire, April 3–10, 1957.

12 Thus, on June 21, 1956, the press reported a fight between Communists and Nationalists at the Cité Universitaire as a result of which one Nationalist was gravely injured and one student expelled.

13 And even their unsuccessful opponent, Dr. Soubiran, author of a best-selling novel, Les Hommes en Blanc, and candidate of the Centre-Républicain as Tardieu was of the Centre national des Indépendants—with little to choose between them.

14 Berger, P. C., “Hitler, cet inconnu,” Ecrits de Paris, March 1955Google Scholar; P. Dominique, “Mussolini et la France,” ibid., July 1955; A. Fabre-Luce, “Munich et la Corée,” ibid., September 1950; Cousteau, P.-A., Rivarol, December 1, 1955.Google Scholar

15 Rivarol, April 18, 1957.

16 Ecrits de Paris, January 1950.

17 Combat, August 24, 1945.

18 Ecrits de Paris, July 1953.

19 Ibid., October 1956 and January 1957; Rivarol, October 11 and November 1, 1956.

20 Bodin, and Touchard, , op.cit., p. 281.Google Scholar

21 Fraternité française, July 20, 1956: Poujade rejected “l'affreux capitalisme anglo-américain et l'infâme dictature russe. …”

22 Another coincidence which sometimes perplexes the observer: the Nationalist Right are “good Europeans,” supporting the Iron and Steel Pool, European Union (on their terms), German rearmament, etc., partly out of a desire to defend Europe against Asia and collectivism, partly out of nostalgia for the New Order they embraced under Pétain or Abetz, partly because they see the European community as dominated by conservative powers (Germany and, behind Germany, the United States) and run by enlightened technocrats.

23 Les Décombres, Paris, 1942, p. 30. Drieu la Rochelle was well aware of this. In Drieu, Temoin et Visionnaire (Paris, 1952, pp. 202–3), P. Andreu quotes an article that Drieu published in the N. R. F. of December 1942: “Je ne suis pas au pouvoir, je ne suis jamais au pouvoir, je ne suis pas de ceux qui sont jamais au pouvoir. Je m'arrange toujours pour être assez mal avec ceux qui sont au pouvoir, même quand ils sont de mon bord.” And his alter ego answered: “C'est bien ce que je te dis, tu n'es qu'un écrivain, tu n'es pas un homme sérieux, tu n'es pas un homme complet. Tu prends des responsabilités, mais tu ne les prends pas jusqu'au bout.” Cf. also Dimier, L., Vingt Ans d'Action Française, Paris, 1926.Google Scholar

24 In November 1955, during the electoral campaign, the French Institute of Public Opinion asked the following question: “Do you think that by voting in the coming elections the electors will have some influence on the country's policy?” Answers: great influence, 14 per cent; little influence, 26 per cent; no influence, 33 per cent; no opinion, 27 per cent; un point, c'est tout. (Sondages, No. 4, 1955, p. 11.)