CHAPTER 9

The Burden of French History

Marx called France the political nation par excellence, as compared to economic England and philosophical Germany. But Marx arrived at his mature theory only after a stern critique of a “merely political” view of revolution. And some of his most important insights are developed in analyses of the failures of revolution in France. While Marx’s observation is insightful, the theoretical conclusions he drew from it are problematic. The monarchy in France was not absolute because it was all-powerful or arbitrary; its power came from the means by which it dominated all spheres of life, transforming an administrative and territorial entity into a political nation. In the wake of the Revolution, the republican tradition became equally absolute; it came to define what the French mean by the political (a concept different from what Anglo-Saxons define as politics). Today, globalization (in its various meanings) seems to threaten the power the French attribute to the political. Either the nation-state, whatever its history, will simply be unable to resist the untamed logic of the global culture and the world economy, or the French tradition will contain resources permitting it to transform itself internally in order to provide a unique way to deal with the changed environment. Is the priority of the political a benefit or a burden?¹

The French political tradition is also challenged from within. The bitter quarrels over political legitimacy that began in 1789 are said by many to have ended when the left came finally to power in 1981 (or when it cohabited with the right, in 1986).² Yet this political success has not eliminated a crippling social anomie, designated by the category “exclusion.” Exclusion does not refer simply to economic conditions; it suggests that the republican political project has not been realized.³ An ambiguity in this project is revealed by this new economic situation. The republican quest for national unity is threatened constantly by the appearance of particularity; the obligations of the citizen clash with the rights guaranteed to the individual. When the economic conjuncture was positive, both the state and the individual could be satisfied. When conditions worsened, the difficulty was hidden by an aversion to the (Anglo-Saxon) vision of an independent judiciary imposing its will in the place of the general will. That attitude has changed as political scandals have undermined the legitimacy of the political elite while permitting the judiciary to acquire a new independence. As a result, individual claims against the state have acquired increased legitimacy.⁴ Such rights are not welfare grants from on high; they permit the kind of self-activity that in principle could integrate the excluded. If this process is successful, it will transform the inherited French political culture into a republican democracy that may indeed be able to face up to globalization.⁵

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE PRIMACY OF THE POLITICAL

The French Revolution sought to replace one form of unitary sovereign power by another. Drawing on the analogy to Christ as the head of the Church Universal, the absolute monarch was the head of the nation, whose permanence transcended in principle his merely temporal activity. But the terms could be inverted. Court life, with its culture of conversation and politesse, reached its heights under Louis XIV. This culture was political only by default; it had been made possible by the destruction of all autonomous political life (whose feudal particularity hindered the political progress of national unification). The Sun King’s domestication of his nobility in the artificial and formal world of Versailles, at a safe distance from the people of Paris, was a triumph bought at a price that would be paid with the Revolution.⁶ The unitary political culture of the absolute monarchy could be challenged only by an equally unitary political claim. It was this challenge that determined the dynamics of the relation of forces after 1789. In retrospect, social and material interests appear important, but they acquired salience only within the framework of the revolutionary contest between unitary values. Over time, “the” Revolution became the primary value. It was feared by its enemies (who created the category “conservative” to justify a political vision that had never previously needed to be named) and adored by its friends (who invented the category “reactionary” to excommunicate those who would not join in its worship).

The political importance of the quest for unity was evident from the very onset of the Revolution. Even before the meeting of the Estates-General, Sieyès had answered his own question, “What is the third estate?” by demonstrating that those who had been “nothing” under the old order must now become “everything.” This logical demand took a step toward realization when the representatives of the three Estates swore the Oath of the Tennis Court, affirming that they spoke for the nation and that they would not separate until its will was realized. The first of many difficulties was foreshadowed when the National Assembly became a Constituent Assembly. Its majority sought to create a constitutional monarchy, reuniting the monarchical head with the national body. This project went aground on the question of the royal veto power. Opponents voiced for the first time the fear of judicial independence when they argued that a veto would permit the king to nullify the unitary popular will. They carried the day, producing the first exiles from the victorious Revolution. The dilemma was patched over by the Constituent Assembly, but it reemerged under the Legislative Assembly and became an explicit contradiction with the king’s flight and his capture at Varennes. The inevitable result was dissolution of the Legislative Assembly and the calling of a constitutional convention that proclaimed a republic founded on the “general will” to replace the now disqualified monarchical claim to incarnate the nation. The Revolution had now truly begun. Its end was not in sight. The radical Jacobin constitution of 1793 was placed in a sacred ark, to be put into practice only when “the” Revolution had been realized. The relation among the revolutionary republic, its constitutional foundation, and its political representatives was troubled, uncertain, and marked by suspicion from the outset. The fact that it had real enemies only magnified the fear of “the” enemy, against whom one always had to be on guard.

The quest for unity provided its own momentum. The choreography was simple and repetitive: opponents denounced as belonging to the ancien régime were identified one after the other and eliminated. The aptly named Comité de salut publique was given a mandate for the salvation of “the” Revolution. Again, the quest for unity produced new divisions. From the audacious Danton to the anonymous Parisian militants around Hébert, all had to be sacrificed so that the Revolution could appear in its fullness. Then came Thermidor. Called the triumph of the reaction, it in fact confirms the unitary logic governing the Revolution. Although the revolution had “eaten its children,” it had also overcome all domestic opposition and defended itself from external danger. The Thermidorians were themselves revolutionaries; they were members of the radical convention, who had voted death for the monarch. Their coup was a product of their fear that Robespierre and his allies represented a threat to the unity of the Revolution. The orator whose power came from his ability to speak as the incarnation of “the” Revolution—as the King had spoken for the Nation—appeared to his revolutionary enemies as the leader of just another faction.⁷ The (again, well-named) “Directory” that now assumed power sought unity by declaring that the Revolution had been realized. Nonetheless, differences emerged, and renewed purges were supplemented by electoral manipulation to prevent the appearance of opposition. The Directors could not direct the Revolution; their particular interventions discredited them. The coup of the 18th Brumaire was based on a new claim to revolutionary legitimacy, as much political as it was military. Napoleon’s defense of “la patrie en danger” was joined to the expansion of the Revolution to realize “la grande Nation.” The Consulate was replaced by the Empire, whose fatal march across Europe externalized the quest for unity that had appeared in 1789. Unable to manage the forces he had inherited and magnified, Napoleon was ultimately the victim of the unmasterable revolutionary quest for unity.

The Restoration, imposed by defeat, did not bring back the absolutist unitary vision of the political, despite the attempt by Louis XVIII to impose the Charter of 1814. Louis succeeded only in provoking the spirit of the Revolution, which reemerged in the astonishing events of the One Hundred Days, when France united with the emperor only to be defeated at Waterloo. But the Revolution was still not dead. The restored Bourbon monarchy was short-lived because it lived in fear of the revolutionary ghost; its passage of a repressive press law finally called forth a revolution in 1830, bringing its Orleanist cousin to the throne. The new monarch, whose ancestor had adopted the name Philippe Egalité in his failed attempt to unite monarchy with revolution in 1792, could not expect support from the legitimists he replaced. He banked rather on a legacy from the empire, the Napoleonic Code, with its codification of private rights. The republican quest for unity was softened by this separation of public and private life and the legitimation of private interest that it entailed. The private quest for enrichment (and the vices accompanying it) was challenged in February 1848 when another revolution demanded the return of the republic. The attempt by some supporters to define republican unity as “social” led to division in the ranks, and the radicals who took to the streets in June were crushed. The moderate republicans now governed, but their rule was haunted still by fear of revolution. New divisions appeared, paving the way for another Bonaparte and then another empire, whose decisive defeat at Sedan (in 1870) made way (after the suppression of the Paris Commune)⁸ for a third attempt to realize the republic. But this Third Republic only seemed to close the history of “the” Revolution.⁹ It had not achieved the unity sought since 1789. Its history repeats the old political conflicts, now represented by different actors.

This compulsive repetition of hardened political logic over the course of a 150 years demands explanation. In France, the concepts of left and right, and their unbridgeable opposition, were defined by support for, or fear of, “the” Revolution. This meant that each political stance sought to incarnate the unity of the nation. In so doing, each was following the same divisive logic that animated its predecessors in the originary revolution. On the left, statist Jacobins fought decentralizing Girondins, while both opposed the voluntarism of Hébertists and the conspiratorial plots of Babeuvists, and all of them denounced the compromises of reformers who looked to the English model of a division of powers. Captives of their imaginary historical self-understanding, each faction denounced the propositions of the others by pinning on them a label inherited from the past. The dance of division could continue because the legacy of the first revolution was a binary political logic so universal and crystalline that it could subsume any political content. Its result is most clear in the republican left’s inability to forge justifiable compromises, which was both cause and effect of the imperative of unity. Potential allies appeared “objectively” to be supporters of the old order. Revolutionary unity excluded plurality. Rigorous in its logic, the republican left was ruthless in putting it into practice, to the point of becoming a threat to itself. The best became the enemy of the better.

Historians too (who became political actors as a result of this logic) saw the world through the eyes of their iconic representatives. Lamartine and Louis Blanc, for example, had been allies before breaking with one another over the “social” republic of 1848; it was no surprise that their well-received historical studies of the Revolution adopted Girondin and Jacobin stances, respectively. The history of the Revolution remained alive and contested in the present. Political divisions among the founders of the Third Republic were foreshadowed by Edgar Quinet’s attempt to demonstrate that republicans need not accept or try to repeat all aspects of “the” Revolution (e.g., de-Christianization, the Terror, or revolutionary war).¹⁰ Because it was unfinished, and stood at the origins of modern France, the history of the Revolution remained embattled territory. Within the Third Republic, Jean Jaurès offered a synthetic “socialist” history to legitimate his Socialist Party in its contest with his orthodox Marxist (Guèsdiste) rivals. The moderate republican politicians who created the first official chair of the history of the Revolution made sure that it was given to Alphonse Aulard, who presented the Girondin vision of events. After the Russian Revolution, Albert Mathiez countered with a rehabilitation of Jacobinism, whose adherents have held the Sorbonne chair since that time.¹¹

The right (which was created by the Revolution) has not been immune to a similar compulsion to repeat old battles. The conflict over the royal veto was led by those who envisaged the creation of a constitutional monarchy on British lines. After their failure, Lafayette attempted his own synthesis after his moment of glory at the Fête de la Fédération of 1790. The greatest challenge was the attempt by the Orleanists to join with the Revolution. These failed syntheses from the right had successors who were most visible in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. While the supporters of the Bourbons adopted the title “Legitimists,” that concept in fact expressed the shared political goal of the right. The difficulty was that, with the exception of the Bourbons, the others on the right accepted the legitimacy of at least the first phase of the Revolution, which had put into question the unitary claims of absolutism. This basic split meant that the groups on the right would remain unable to unite in a common cause other than opposition to a specter called “the” Revolution. That is why the legacy of Bonaparte remains ambiguous, representing a potential legitimacy for the left as well as the right.¹² Bonaparte was the revolutionary who put an end to the evil by-products of revolutionary anarchy. As Marx rightly saw, this ambiguity permitted the nephew, Louis Bonaparte, to ride the revolution of 1848 to take power in an empire that did not appear usurped or imposed on society.

Two political-intellectual orientations escaped at least in part the compulsive repetition of revolutionary politics: liberalism and utopian socialism. The heirs of the Anglophile constitutionalists seized the occasion of the revolution of 1830 to pass from opposition to power. Led by François Guizot, to whom Marx famously gave credit for first recognizing the importance of class struggle in world historical development, this liberalism appealed for support to a new bourgeoisie that had been liberated from feudal corporatism by the Revolution. In this way, French liberalism could also lay claim to the revolutionary (but not the republican) legacy. As opposed to the competing republicans and antirepublicans, liberalism’s debt to the Revolution is not political; it is sociological. Guizot designates the new bourgeoisie as “les capacités” and suggests that liberal politics has a negative goal: to free these new social forces from the fetters of political constraint. This explains the famous imperative attributed to him: “Enrichissez-vous!” With society rather than the state in command, unity is expected to find its own, economic path. This unspoken return of the republican concern with unity was shared with liberalism’s arch critic, utopian socialism, which draws on the same sociological insight into the new capabilities unleashed by the overthrow of the old regime. The utopian socialists, beginning with Saint-Simon, were willing to give politics its place—as long as those with the proper abilities were in charge. Despite their turn to sociology, both political theories are thus also infected by the republican legacy of the Revolution.

The French politics of historical repetition is both explained by and in turn explains a remarkable blindness to the evolution of social reality. The logic of pure politics remains dominant because it recognizes nothing outside itself that could impose a different form of behavior. Fascinated by its own purity, it has no reason to look to society. If the liberals and utopians seem to escape, that is because they do not succumb to the worship of “the” Revolution as a unitary whole. The stress on unity implies that politics cannot accept the legitimacy of its opponents. As a result, it cannot understand or situate itself; when it encounters difficulties, it blames them on the malevolent enemy who advances under the guise of friendship or on the neutral whose lack of real enthusiasm is a hidden obstacle. This self-assured politics cannot see itself for what it is in actuality (as opposed to what it wishes to be); it takes its wishes for reality, believes its own claim of identity with the nation, blinding itself to the reality that it merely represents a particular political choice. Such political solipsism is unable to recognize the reality of society—its changing historical development and its internal divisions. Together with the unitary representation of “the” Revolution, this solipsistic politics explains why political parties are treated as threats to republican unity; they stand for the intrusion of social particularity into the domain of the political.¹³ The logic of the political first defined in the Revolution continues to justify its own eternal recurrence.¹⁴

Despite this solipsism, obsessive repetition, and social blindness, the legacy of the Revolution has a dynamic character; although repetitive in its form, French history did not stand still. This is the result of the impact of the values that the Revolution consecrated as the rights of man and of the citizen. Inscribed in the preamble to its constitution, these rights are at one and the same time proclaimed by the citizens of the French nation and declared to be universal rights belonging to all men, regardless of their national or social characteristics. Like the republic, these rights are assumed in principle to be universally valid but not yet fully realized. This dual status contributed to the almost religious zeal with which “the” Revolution was received by its supporters and hated by its opponents; the universal values it promises are in principle capable of indefinite extension (for example, to all women). The tension that binds a universal principle to its temporary realization lends a dynamic character to the static cycle of political repetition. That is why French history is political history, and France is obsessed by this history. But it is a doubled, illusory, and self-mystifying history. As with the republican historians, the past is studied not for what it actually was but in order to find past values (such as the rights of man) whose proclamation forms part of the logical progress toward the future realization of the republican revolution. As a result, the historical dynamic that is produced by the tension between the universal and the particular, between principles and their temporary realization, is not real; the historian presupposes what he wants to prove, and the history described is in fact a history that is prescribed. The French obsession with history turns out to be a kind of narcissism whose results contribute to the maintenance of the politics of repetition.¹⁵

The dynamics introduced by the demand for rights suggests an explanation for the lack of concern with democracy’s contribution to the republican political project. If the republican principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen were truly realized, democracy would be substantively achieved by overcoming the opposition of (private) man and (public) citizen. This means that democracy is an end of politics rather than a means that affects the nature of the end sought. Democracy appears to be the social result of a political process rather than being itself a form of political action. In practice, democracy means division, it thrives on competition, and it thereby furthers the particularism that threatens the universal republic. The argument seems logical: since democracy is an end, the republic must be the means to its realization.¹⁶ But this claim neglects the question of the means for the realization of the republic itself. The problem was not simply theoretical; the unavoidable lesson of French history is the difficulty of passing from the overthrow of one regime to the stable realization of another. It became a very practical (and difficult) matter when Prussia’s victory in 1870 destroyed the Second Empire. Political power was vacant, but the republic that replaced it was explicitly provisional, and the assembly elected under the aegis of this republic had strong monarchist leanings. Skillful maneuvering by Thiers and the quarrel of the pretenders to the throne led finally to the constitution of the Third Republic in 1875, more than four years after the end of the Empire.

The new republic undertook a process of modernization that recalls the political achievement of the absolute monarchy in creating a nation from a collection of territorial properties. The achievement is captured in Eugen Weber’s classic phrase: “peasants to Frenchmen.” The method employed is epitomized in the introduction of universal education associated with the name of Jules Ferry.¹⁷ The republican theory of educational progress reformulates the historical tension that animated the Declaration of Rights. As in the case of rights, whose universality must be assumed before each individual citizen affirms them himself, this educational theory assumes that the student is capable of appropriating the general knowledge encapsulating the best of human history. The fact that not everyone will realize fully this knowledge does not disqualify either the knowledge or the student seeking to acquire it. Rather, it points to a second assumption of the educational theory, which explains how it provides the means to realize the republic: Universal education for all will result in the production of a republican elite without which the shared and universal republican historical project cannot be developed further.¹⁸ This elite is not conceived as separate from the nation; like the republican general will, it is rather the essential realization of the nation, bringing to fruition republican unity. Universal education means that anyone can become a part of this elite, which is not a self-perpetuating aristocracy. It works for the good of all even though not everyone is a part of it. Once again, democracy is the end sought by the republic, not the means to its realization. More than a century later, and in a new republic, this form of republican modernization would face unexpected problems.

The republican elite is designated as the service public, France’s specific form of political administration. As an agent of social modernization, this political elite has had a crucial role. Legitimated by the universal educational opportunities offered to all and confirmed by competitive exams open to all, it is an uncontested meritocracy. But its success contained the seeds of its own failure. The initial successes were based on an education that permitted all to attain basic skills (and the historical-political knowledge needed for citizenship). Over time, the skills needed to adapt to society increased; higher education of greater numbers was needed, and offered. As was the case elsewhere, it was necessary to open higher education to increasing numbers. As the university came to be seen as the ticket to social success, the difference between the republican elite and the society it was to serve became less evident. The elite feared being leveled down, while the increasingly educated public saw no reason for its political exclusion. Reforms were needed, but the inherited republican principles (and the vested interests that skillfully appealed to them) seemed to make change impossible. May ’68 brought a brief glimmer of hope that was soon extinguished. After a first failure by the Socialists to reform the system, their very republican minister of education, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, let the symbolic cat out of the bag in November 1985 when he proclaimed the goal of 80 percent of each class successfully passing the baccalaureate exam required for university admission. This, it now appeared, was the reality of the republican form of democracy: a leveling social equality whose denial of the difference that legitimated the republican elite destroys the raison d’être of politics.

The argument that the successful republic has undermined itself calls attention to the strength as well as the limits of the French logic of pure politics. The complete realization of the republican project would overcome the tension between the universality of rights and their particular realization; that is why republican politics is not foreign to the socialist vision of Marx. But the divisions and stubborn resistance of social reality cannot be ignored. This social resistance cannot be reduced to a reflection of the macroeconomic difficulties facing advanced capitalist nations that try to maintain a welfare state in the face of high unemployment, an aging population, and a fluid global market for capital funds. As at the time of the French Revolution, the political salience of such social facts depends on the framework in which they come to the attention of the public. If the educational system is to be reformed and the dignity of the service public reestablished, participation of society in the political republic is needed. That democratic complement to the republican vision is implicit in the French adoption of the broad label of exclusion to designate the difficulty the nation faces. To understand the force of this concept and its relation to contemporary democratic demands, it is necessary to return again to French history—starting now from the Socialist victory in 1981, which was said to put an end to the revolutionary quest for a realized political republic that the Third Republic only began.¹⁹

TRANSLATING SOCIAL ISSUES INTO POLITICAL PRACTICE BEFORE 1989

The program on which François Mitterrand and the Socialists were elected was—socialist! In light of the persistence of the republican political vision, this surprising option for socialism needs explanation. It is true that many aspects of the program, such as the educational reforms that would integrate into the national educational system the Catholic schools whose separate existence was deemed a residue of the ancien régime, were indeed reflections of the republican tradition. The old reflexes were still present too in the party’s vocabulary; for example, at its victory celebration in October 1981 at Valence, the party’s general secretary, Paul Quilès, demanded that “we should not say like Robespierre at the Convention ‘Heads will roll’; we should say which ones, and say it quickly.”²⁰ But adherence to the economic socialism of the platform was a disaster. The stalled economy was to be restarted by increased demand resulting from raised wages and benefits at all levels, plus the addition of a fifth vacation week. The state also undertook a 100 percent nationalization of a collection of major industries, with the result that some 24 percent of all workers were directly on the government’s payroll. This Keynesianism in one country failed. Inflation resulted in falling production and rising unemployment, followed by three devaluations of the franc; finally the government had to abandon “socialisme à la française.”

Two questions follow from this inglorious episode, whose further details and tactical abandonment can be left aside here. (1) Why did the left opt for these ritualized socialist economic measures when it was clear that the Thirty Glorious Years (les trente glorieuses) that had modernized French capitalism had come to an end in the period following the 1973 oil crisis? After all, from the point of view of socialism, it was the weakened economy that brought the left to power. The answer depends on an ideological compatibility of this kind of socialism with a specific interpretation of the republican project that had traditionally defined the left. The source of that ideology needs to be explained. (2) What would become of the left once its socioeconomic project had proven itself to be unrealizable and the market had seemingly had its way? If the old republican alternative based on the centralizing rationality of an elite administration was not politically viable, what could replace it for a people whose culture had been historically overdetermined by the political? Could it be renewed on the strength of its own virtues, by being combined with a democratic project that would emerge as a potential replacement for the old elite that had lost its pertinence in the modernized French republic?

The left in France cannot be identified with the cause of socialism or with the Socialist (or Communist) Party.²¹ Because the revolution preceded the emergence of what the nineteenth century called “the social problem,” the left was identified as the party of the republic. The republican cause was presented first of all in the fight for universal (male) suffrage rather than for immediate social change. Insofar as society was at all considered by republican politics, it was denounced as complicit with the old order (which is one reason that male suffrage was sought: women were thought to be in the thralls of the church, itself a weapon of the reaction). Later republicanism could of course take a radical form, transforming the fight against privilege into a struggle for social equality. But not all republicans would go so far (as was seen in June 1848); as a result, the left was subject to splits and factionalism, since the domain to which equality was to apply remained open to dispute, ranging from electoral participation to social justice. Even when it was socially radical, early republicanism was led by an elite that sought to use the power of the state to impose the universality of the law for the good of all. This mode of political intervention meant that republicans who were concerned with social betterment had to choose whether to enter into compromises with other, less radical factions in order to acquire some power to effect some good or to remain principled but powerless. When they did enter such compromises—for example, after the failed workers’ rising in June of 1848 or in the tense years when the Third Republic was being established—they were accused of compromise with the old order. Their dilemma became more painful as industrial growth produced an ever-larger urban working class and a more glaringly prosperous capitalism. How could the republicans retain their political project in the face of rising social injustice? What stance could they take with regard to projects for social reform?

The situation was no less difficult for the newly created Socialist parties. Their socialism had to overcome the republican political blindness to social problems if it was to find a hearing in French political life. The concept of class meant they spoke explicitly for only a part of society; class-based politics appeared to be inherently dogmatic and antirepublican. The Socialists could argue that they were seeking nothing different from what the radical republicans of 1848 sought: to restore political unity by overcoming social divisions. But the radicals had been defeated in 1848—although the indecisiveness of their moderate former allies had paved the way for Bonaparte’s coup. The problem returned each time the possibility of reform through compromise seemed possible. How could social reform be justified by republican political means? Either republican politics debased itself by defending the cause of a particular interest, or the reform proved to be only a partial realization (and a weakening) of the social cause that justified it. This structural dilemma of French socialism explains why, after the Russian Revolution and creation of the Third International, an explicitly Communist party was created after the scission that took place at the Socialist Congress of Tours in 1920, setting the stage for a fratricidal competition for the proud heritage of the republican left. The terms of the competition were constantly renegotiated, but both parties seemed to find the heritage worth fighting for.

This structural dilemma explains the importance of ideology, and particularly of Marxism, for the French left. If a republican government forms alliances to rule jointly through compromise, each participant has to be able to distinguish itself and legitimate its choices. When Marxism became the dominant ideology of the workers’ movement with the creation of the Socialist International in Paris in 1889—not incidentally, the centenary of the French Revolution—each decision had to be justified with reference to that theory. The same was true when a faction within the party sought to influence other members or the party line or even to found a new party. (This meant that the theory could never develop further as a theory, for it was by definition the criterion by which other theories were evaluated and criticized. That is why the French contribution to Marxist theory is so limited despite the crucial political role of that theory. It also explains why the French understanding of Marxist theory is often limited to the ability to cite from various collections of Morceaux choisis. Finally, it suggests why Marxism attained such cultural currency in France.) This central role of Marxism as ideology also meant that political participation by workers tended to be sparse; their concerns were more immediate and often better addressed by trade union activity. As a result, the leaders of the Socialist Party tended to be representatives of the kind of intellectual elite typical of the republican tradition. The model was Jean Jaurès, who managed to ally socialism to the republican tradition by his decision to involve the party in the Dreyfus affair when the competing socialist factions considered the injustice done to the Jewish captain to be simply a matter for the bourgeoisie to fight out among itself.²² The model persisted in the interwar years in the person of Léon Blum, who distinguished the (republican) exercise of power from the (socialist) conquest of power, which was to be prepared by its exercise.

The ideological maneuvers and compromises that sought to paste together the goals of the socially oriented left with the republican tradition were already being denounced in the nineteenth century by an antiparliamentary left that became solidly implanted. The best-known figure in the early period is Proudhon, who insisted that the artisan workers had to organize their own salvation outside the framework of parliamentary politics. Toward the end of the century, as union organization (and industrialization) proceeded apace, self-managed Bourses de Travail—distinct also from the capitalist Bourse, or stock market—became rallying points competing with the organized parliamentary socialists for the attention of the workers. The strength of antiparliamentary sentiment was evident when the CGT (General Confederation of Labor, created in 1895 by a fusion of the self-managed Bourses with the traditional trade unions) rejected the proposal for a fusion with the parliamentary socialists at its 1906 congress in Amiens. Independence from political parties has remained a foundation of French trade union action.²³ It is a proud autonomy that can also trace its origins to the oppositional journées of the Revolution. This is another reason it has been difficult to invent a French version of a reformist, social-democratic politics of compromise similar to that of other modern democratic industrial societies. Although Proudhon’s artisans were long ago replaced by an industrial working class and then by a new working class, the idea that political affiliation depends on economic class remains strong.

A further aspect of the antiparliamentary tradition is more dangerous. It can make room for an antidemocratic, chauvinist, meanspirited temper that was present already in some of Proudhon’s work and has developed since his time. This is where the far right²⁴ meets the far left, whether at the time of the Dreyfus affair, during the confused Depression years, with the acceptance of the Vichy regime, or after the war in the movements of Poujade and later Le Pen. This unintended and unexpected meeting of opposites is made possible by the devaluation of the republican ideal. It was that republican ideal that constrained the socialists to try to work within the parliamentary republic while simultaneously defending the interests of a particular social class. Only in this way, it appeared, were reforms possible. But these same reformist compromises also provided grist for the antiparliamentary mills put into action by antipoliticians of the left or the right. The only way out of this dilemma was through the appeal to ideology as a justification proving that the compromise is called for by the doctrine itself. This explains why the French Socialists entered government in 1981 with a platform that was socialist. They had formulated a “Common Program” with the Communist Party, which could provide them with the ideological legitimation that would make their parliamentary politics credible.²⁵

Now that the question of why a socialist platform was adopted in 1981 has been clarified, it remains to consider what conclusions can be drawn from the failure to unite the republican and socialist programs. The facts are simple enough. At first, attempting to make a virtue of necessity, the Socialists tried to reconcile the rigor of the market’s laws with the universality of republican law. They also attempted to use “Europe” as the kind of motivating ideal that “the republic” had represented in the creation of the Third Republic. This resulted only in the Acte unique européen of 1985, which was a modest attempt to make possible a renewal of Keynesianism on a more defensible, Europe-wide scale.²⁶ None of this prevented the defeat of the Socialists in the 1986 parliamentary elections. But the right, still haunted by its antirepublican traditions, went too far too fast. Overconfident, it sought to emulate the antistate radicalism of Reagan and Thatcher. This permitted President Mitterrand (whose term ran until 1998) to adopt the role of arbiter standing above the passions and interests of politics; he made himself a republican monarch, transforming the “cohabitation” of left and right into a realization of the unity long sought by the republic. As a bonus, the radicalism of his opponents permitted Mitterrand to present himself as a Socialist simply by defending the mixed economy. This prepared his reelection in 1988. Tellingly, his new campaign did not appeal to socialism or even draw on the resources of the Socialist Party; his platform was presented in a public “Letter to All the French,” in which he proposed a politics of “neither-nor”: neither nationalizations nor privatizations. The realized republic appeared to be pacified.

However remarkable Mitterrand’s personal success, it poses a question about French political culture today. Mitterrand understood that the Socialists’ victory was based on the unique political structure introduced by the Fifth Republic. The direct election of the president (and the power accorded him) changed the rules of the political game. The old SFIO had decomposed as the Algerian war became more poisonous. The primacy of economic development implied by its Marxist ideology let it hope that it could have it both ways, arguing that it was the duty of France to remain in Algeria in order to develop the economic basis for an autonomy that would gradually bring independence. That may have been plausible abstractly, or in the long run, but politics is a dynamic process in which there is more than one actor. The demise of the Fourth Republic, and de Gaulle’s acceptance of Algerian independence, created the conditions needed for rebuilding French socialism. Its strategy remained oriented to winning state power; its ideology was largely unchanged, but its tactics were modified. Mitterrand recognized that the need for a runoff election if no presidential candidate won an absolute majority in the first round could be used to his advantage. In 1965 he was able to gain the support of a broad republican as well as socialist left to win 45 percent in the runoff. (Such support is the result of what is designated candidly as discipline républicaine, which permits the elector to vote for a particular party in the first round while assuming that the good of the nation will motivate his final decision.) After the failure of the divided left even to place a candidate in the runoff in 1969, Mitterrand’s earlier success provided the legitimacy needed to create a new Socialist Party (PS) at Epinay in 1971 and to impose himself as its leader.

Electoral tactics are not the only explanation of Mitterrand’s success. Although he had not been a socialist, he was able to impose his leadership over the moribund SFIO because of a second modification brought about by the constitution that created the Fifth Republic. The electoral rules that Mitterrand had used so well in 1965 also changed the relation of the leader to both his party and the electorate. The direct election of the executive meant that there was no longer a need for party activists (and lower elected officials) to act as mediators between the candidate and the public. A new logic emerged. The party became an instrument at the service of its candidate, on whose success the fate of its members depended. The imbalance between the summit and the base was increased by the subordination of the elected representatives in Parliament to the powerful executive, which had the effect of denying elected members of the party any autonomous power that could be used to rein in the party leader. Parliamentary or social republicanism now gave way to a new political form, a kind of plebiscitary democracy that is often designated as a “democracy of opinion.”²⁷ Mitterrand proved a tactical master of the new rules. Only one dimension escaped him: as with the old parliamentary socialists, he was forced to justify his compromises by appealing to the still-dominant Marxist ideology—with the disastrous economic consequences of 1981–1983.

The concept of a democracy of opinion designates the establishment of a direct relation of the politician to the electorate, unmediated by particular political institutions. This relation is created with the aid of modern techniques of communication, whose use is of course not unique to France. More particular to France is the relation between the democracy of opinion and the political phenomena that Yves Mény analyzes under the title La corruption de la république.²⁸ The corruption that is peculiarly French is not that of individuals using public office for private gain; that kind of illegality exists no doubt in all political societies. The French kind of corruption is more philosophical; it refers to the rotting from within of the foundational principles (or virtues) of a society. This kind of corruption is particularly dangerous in a nation that conceives of itself as republican. Corruption of the republic (which paves the way for individual corruption) sets in when activists play a decreasing role, while communications specialists become more important, and politics becomes increasingly expensive as a result. The finances needed for a campaign cannot be raised from members’ dues. Other sources of revenue must be found. Lobbying firms (which the French call “bureaux d’expertise” or “bureaux d’études,” on the assumption that expert knowledge represents no particular interest) are created by the political parties, at both national and local levels. These party-dependent firms can then overcharge their clients, recycling into the party’s coffers taxpayer (or private) money that was factored into the cost of a new school, public facility, or rezoned land.²⁹

When the French use the concept of a democracy of opinion, there is an overtone of critical distance that expresses disdain sometimes for the role accorded to mere opinion, sometimes for the role of democracy. But it is precisely the new role of public opinion that explains the denunciation of political corruption. The practices that have come to light in recent years are not new, nor are their uses limited to a single party. But they were long overlooked in part because of the lack of independence of the French judiciary and in part because of the complicity of the politicians themselves.³⁰ It is not just the (undeniable) courage of investigating magistrates that has brought about a change. The system itself creates the conditions that challenge its legitimacy. Public opinion loves scandal; investigative journalism (which has not been typical of the French press) needs leaks to feed that opinion, while investigating magistrates can recall the outraged cries of the public when their political superiors try to restrain their zealous pursuit of corruption. As a result, citizens who are reduced to spectators by the new political institutions are now able now to see the corruption of political life; the cynicism that results is not the kind of virtue needed to maintain a republican society. Yet the goal of the journalists and of the magistrates is to restore that republican political system. It is not clear which tendency will predominate: private cynicism or the renewal of republican virtue.³¹

Despite much talk and some limited reforms, a trait typical of French political life that dates back to the monarchy has been strengthened by the Fifth Republic: the “cumul” (accumulation of functions). A successful French politician must occupy positions at both the national and local levels; indeed, it is wise to have an official role at many (public, semipublic, and private) levels between the two extremes. This practice is said to be functional for all concerned. As a representative of the locality, the politician can intervene with the national government to get help, and as a participant in the national government, the representative brings an appreciation of local particularities, permitting efficient administration. In this way, the cumul ensures what the logic of French republicanism calls “la synthèse.” (Other political logics might recognize here a conflict of interests.) This synthesis not only unites the different levels of political intervention; it also provides a second mediation, between the local electorate (or particular interests within it) and the powerful state bureaucracy (whose task is to translate the universality of the law for application to particular cases by means of so-called décrets d’application).³² This second synthesis is needed in order to make the bureaucratic machine function smoothly while taking account of particularities that fall outside the generality of the law. At the same time, however, it weakens the ability of the state to exercise its centralizing legislative power.

The interplay of these two aspects of the cumul contributes to the depoliticization that accompanies the democracy of opinion. On the one hand, the elected national representative has little reason to be present in Paris, where his (and increasingly her) interventions count for little in a parliament that is subordinated to the executive who controls the destiny of the party and where the bureaucracy jealously protects its autonomy from party politics. The ability of the representative to intervene meaningfully depends on the control of a slice of local power that can be made useful to the national party. This gives the national representative a positive reason to cultivate the home turf, with the result that Parliament is weakened further, attendance decreases, and political committees are left in the hands of experts and a small coterie of political leaders. (The power of such leaders explains another peculiarity of French politics: the “parachuting” of a national figure into a new local electoral district, which is expected to support the outsider because this will bring national influence that even a popular local leader could not attain easily.) These conditions affect also the elite of the service public, whose ability to serve the public is weakened by the second aspect of the cumul, which ensures that local particularity is taken into account. As a result, the elite becomes demoralized, and, in a society where private and monetary advancement has become increasingly important outside as well as within politics, increasing numbers are leaving for private industry.³³ Elite abstention from politics nourishes in turn the cynicism of the democracy of opinion.

The general corruption of the republic produces the conditions that lead to the denunciation of the particular practices of corruption that empty republicanism of its meaning, destroying the ideals it carried and the political style that made its citizens more than just privatized and atomized individuals. This denunciation of corruption may be a sign that republican ideals are not dead. But it may also create a public of cynics who are not just apolitical but strongly antipolitical. The replacement of political activism by expertise in communications techniques is only the external manifestation of a deeper rot. France was a nation built around politics and the expectation that problems could be solved in the political arena. When that belief disappears—even if the belief was based on an illusion—the society finds itself without a rudder. The antipolitical vein that has been present in French life since the revolutionary journées gains strength. So-called social movements return—for example, in the massive strikes of December 1995 that led to the fall of the right-wing prime minister, Alain Juppé.³⁴ These social movements are not necessarily on the side of the progress identified with the left, as was evident with the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front (abetted by Mitterrand’s cynical electoral tactic of 1986, when he introduced proportional representation in order to divide the right). The danger is that such movements and their advocates, most notably in Le Monde diplomatique, plead the cause of the victims, happy to take the side of the oppressed, while idealizing conditions that supposedly existed before the economy became global and social relations were monetarized. This too is part of the corruption of the republic, whose vision of political justice was never oriented to a mythical past.

The regeneration of French republicanism will depend on its success in reforming itself as a republican democracy. As has been seen, democracy in France was traditionally understood as the result of republican politics, an end not a means. This attitude began to change at the same time that the Socialists were joining with the Communists finally to conquer state power. A so-called second left led by Michel Rocard emerged within the Socialist Party to challenge its statist and centralizing presuppositions. It was joined by those for whom the movements for human rights in Poland and increasingly across Eastern Europe represented a renewal of the meaning of political participation. Assuming that the Soviet Union would never permit them to seize state power, these movements sought to organize the autonomy of civil society against the state. The support for these East-Central European struggles from self-identified leftists was significant; it distinguished the French left from other lefts in the capitalist world that were more ambivalent about the nature and future of “really existing socialism.” This political orientation in part emerged because the critique of totalitarianism arose much later in France than elsewhere. It contributed to the unique French reaction to the translation of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago—although the impact of the book’s revelations (and political arguments)³⁵ depended also on the fact that the French Communist Party had appropriated the mantle of the radical republic, which it combined with an antiparliamentary populism (and a legend of antifascist resistance) to make itself a cultural power even though its real political weight was small and growing weaker. As a result, the French critique of totalitarianism was a self-critique of its own tradition. This self-critique of both the republican and the socialist elements of French political culture, combined with the new appreciation for a self-organizing civil society, has made possible a reevaluation of the place of democracy.

TOWARD A REPUBLICAN DEMOCRACY?

The new attitude toward democracy had another antecedent: May ’68. The events of that May of course meant many things to many different people, which is no doubt why one of the most memorable slogans affirmed that “it is forbidden to forbid.” In the present context, it was another step toward the end of French socialist illusions. The mass demonstration of a million people on May 13 passed under the balcony of Mitterrand’s political vehicle of the moment, the FGDS (Fédération de la Gauche Démocratique et Socialiste), without a serious glance, while consigning to the tail of the march the “Stalinist scum” (crapules staliniennes), who were desperate now to board the speeding train they had done their best to sabotage. At the end of the demonstration, an old question reemerged: what is to be done? Those who cried, “A l’Elysée!” were dismissed as anarchists. Those who took themselves (and history) more seriously had a different idea. As strikes continued to paralyze society, a demonstration on May 27 at the Charlety stadium was attended by the respected former republican prime minister Pierre Mendès-France. Could he be brought temporarily to power, a French Kerensky leading a “February revolution,” until new Bolsheviks (or a rapidly maturing proletariat) could overthrow him?³⁶ History did not repeat itself. A country had been paralyzed, revolution seemed at hand, and then, with a speech of the president (and his visit to French military bases in Germany), it was over. Now the right could send its millions into the street. Less than a month later, it won a massive 358–127 majority in Parliament that for historical French memories recalled the “Chambre introuvable” elected after the Restoration of Louis XVIII.

Lessons had to be drawn, and they were. Many activists sought to continue their struggle, joining the Trotskyists and Maoists or even hoping to radicalize a Communist Party whose role during the events was hardly glorious (but whose presidential candidate in 1969 scored 21.5 percent to the Socialist’s 5 percent). But their hard work with a lack of noticeable progress gradually forced many to recognize the truth of their own experience (and that of French political culture): 1968 was not the beginning of a long struggle toward revolution; 1968 was the demonstration that revolution is not possible in modern society. This is one reason that in France, as opposed to Germany or Italy, no serious leftist group argued that terrorism represented a viable political method.³⁷ It is also part of the explanation of the turn to ethics that came to replace the political project.³⁸ This ethical option did not have to be antipolitical; the demand for the rights of man had been an animating factor in the self-organizing civil societies of Eastern Europe. Ethics could contribute to a renewal of republican values, as in the case of André Glucksmann, who abandoned his Maoism to bring together Sartre and Aron in support of the Vietnamese boat people and has remained the ethical conscience of political engagement. Similarly, the young doctors who founded Médecins sans frontières were former sixty-eighters who didn’t forget their political past. Their first intervention, during the Nigerian civil war (or Biafran struggle for independence), showed that they were aware that formal neutrality under the guise of ethical evenhandedness can hide a real bias constituted by facts on the ground. For the same reason, later French leftists did not just protest the massacres at Vukovar or Srebenica; they analyzed and condemned the responsibility of the Milošsević regime. The ethics embodied by this republican left is individual but not individualistic (which may be one reason that John Rawls for so long remained untranslated into French).

The politics of the post-1968 left had theoretical roots as well. The publication of Mai 1968: La brèche underlined the rupture that the new movement introduced into the tradition of socialist politics. Its three authors, Edgar Morin, Claude Lefort, and Jean-Marc Coudray (a.k.a. Cornelius Castoriadis), draw positive consequences from their critique of Marxist politics. Lefort and Castoriadis had been Trotskyists who came to see that their Marxist search for the material basis of Stalinism brought to light a paradox: those conditions had been created by the political seizure of power by the Bolshevik party. For his part, Morin had drawn similar conclusions from his exclusion in 1951 from the Communist Party that he had joined during the Resistance. The radical rethinking of the nature and goals of political action undertaken in the enforced isolation of the French ultra left permitted these three authors to recognize that 1968 could not be recuperated by the old order whose self-declared foes in fact had a stake in its maintenance. The formerly isolated critics began to find a public. Morin’s Autocritique (1958) was republished in a mass edition in 1970, at the same time that a twelve-volume edition of Castoriadis’s essays from Socialisme ou Barbarie began to appear. The impact of this critique was double. The Marxism that had frozen into an ideology of political legitimation was thrown into question. As a result, Marx became again a critical philosopher, although explicit reference was no longer useful since Marxism had been denounced as ideology. But if Marxism could no longer serve to legitimate political choices, some replacement had to be found. Ethics was one candidate, human rights a second, democracy became a third.

The path by which the French left came to place its hopes in political democracy colored its understanding of the term. The critique of Marxism and its totalitarian reality put into question any doctrine (including aspects of the republican tradition) that laid claim to be the incarnation, essence, or true unity of the people or nation. Moreover, the critique of Soviet pretensions to being a true democracy made it clear that institutions alone cannot create or ensure the maintenance of a democratic society. Democracy could not be taken either as what Marx liked to call “the finally discovered secret” of historical evolution, as if it could put an end to all societal ills. These three critical insights pointed to the fact that democracy is a problem; it is not a (static or univocal) solution to social or political difficulties. This understanding of democracy as a problem was confirmed by French history, whose compulsive and repetitious course it also helps clarify. Democracy can be seen as the attempt to formulate the conditions in which the differences that were wrested from the unitary culture of the ancien régime can not just coexist but enrich each other. (In this way, the theory of democracy could be made compatible but not identical with aspects—including the self-interested economic motivation—of the French liberalism typified by Guizot.) These democratic differences are not comparable to the fixed and permanent status marks of a hierarchical society; they are differences that coexist within a field whose foundation is the principle of a basic equality of rights. Although the right to difference that is the precondition of democracy was made possible by the Revolution, republican (and later socialist) political culture sought constantly to eliminate it. That is why these republican and socialist goals can only be realized if they are constrained to take into account the problem of democracy.

Democracy as the maintenance and legitimation of difference can be understood as a means that becomes its own end and motivation. Difference is not naturally present in society; the right to democratic difference, and its legitimacy, depends on politics. Difference is not indifference, the dumb coexistence of inert objects examined by a neutral observer unaffected by them. Difference exists only against a backdrop of unity (such as the principle of an equality of rights). This is where the French republican (and socialist) political tradition comes to the aid of the fledgling democracy.³⁹ Neither the traditional political parties nor the elite of the service public can be expected to carry the democratic project. Nor can democracy as the affirmation of difference be identified with the direct popular participation of the street that has been traditional since the revolutionary journées. The hope that new social movements and new forms of self-management would provide the needed innovation has failed. Rather, when a univocal interpretation is avoided, it appears that the globalization feared by many also offers unexpected openings for democratic politics. The precondition of the present stage of globalization (which has gone beyond the multinational corporate age or the reciprocal lowering of industrial tariffs to foster the internationalization of culture, services, and finance) was the end of the cold war. That made possible a transformation of the relation of the citizen to the state. The republican ideal remains, but the absence of an enemy makes its logic less materially imperative. (The existence of real enemies of the post-1789 republic played the same role for the first republican logic.) The concept of republican unity can now appear for the first time as what it always was: the symbolic representation of society’s own values. This symbolic role was incarnated by the absolute monarch; for the republic, it is represented by the principle of equal rights. The Revolution confused the incarnation with what it incarnated. Killing the real king, it gave new life to his symbolic role as a threat to a republican unity that, for the same reason, was doomed to repetition because the symbolic can never be fully realized.⁴⁰ But the symbolic is not without real effects, as French history constantly demonstrates.

As is so often the case, French history illuminates contemporary France. Concern with the corruption of the republic had an antecedent: worry about the corruption of the monarchy. The remedy offered then was appeal to the quasi-independent judicial bodies called the parlements. Their role in creating the climate of public opinion that led to the calling of the Estates-General was vital. Their disappearance after 1789 is explained by the unitary logic of French republican politics. To replace the monarchy, the Revolution had to speak with one voice and to create one unique and unified general will. Judicial autonomy was a threat to unity in the same way as was royal veto power.⁴¹ But the independent lawyer did not disappear with the Revolution; indeed, the period from 1875 to 1920 is often referred to as “the Republic of Lawyers [La République des avocats].” These were lawyers who had gone into politics; they were not representatives of the law as such. The recent political scandals within the democracy of opinion have been produced by magistrates—public servants who were acting now in the service of the law.

The first appearance of a demand for the autonomy of the magistrates dates not surprisingly to their creation of an autonomous professional union in the wake of 1968. Another step occurred in 1971, with the judicial ruling that the preamble to the constitution—the Declaration of the Rights of Man—was part of the “bloc de constitutionalité.” This opened a new flexibility in legal interpretation that was extended to include the idea of rights that, although not explicit, have “a constitutional value” (as the court ruled in 1994 concerning a right to housing). The cultural import of these developments was suggested by the creation in 1985 of a journal, Droits, whose premise was that “the science of law has its place among the human and social sciences and belongs more generally to the shared culture of society.”⁴² These developments challenged the traditional orientation of French legal thinking, both before and after the Revolution, which had been toward unified administrative law. From this point of view, the impact of globalization on the state encourages a political reflection on the symbolic status of republican unity that makes room for a rethinking of the autonomy of law and the right to difference within a democratic political culture.

The intervention of the judiciary can be understood as the production and legitimation of difference. When the magistrate was simply an arm of the (republican or absolutist) state, justice and the interest of that state were identical, while individual rights were a private matter whose protection was possible only by the state applying the law uniformly. Although the magistrates remain servants of the state (as opposed to the independent avocat, or lawyer), they are likely to win still more autonomy in the present political climate. When the magistrate serves the law by protecting individual rights, particular interest acquires an autonomy and a legitimacy that it previously lacked. The increased public interest in judicial matters has a further consequence. The clash of two interests (and their lawyers) in the judicial arena presupposes implicitly that both interests are potentially or in principle legitimate. The court renders a judgment, whereas the central state subsumes particular cases under general administrative rules. While a juridical society may become quarrelsome, it is also a society that recognizes a right to difference precisely because and insofar as that right is based on the assumption that there is a shared symbolic conception of justice that permits the (never final) adjudication of the coexistence of these rights and differences.⁴³ An autonomous judiciary cannot create a democracy, but a democracy cannot be maintained without judicial liberty, which not only prevents individual corruption but also challenges the corruption of the republic. Such a judiciary becomes a political institution precisely to the degree that it is not a politicized institution. The evaluation and legitimation of individual differences imply the recognition of the symbolic status of republican unity. The republic is not denied when it has to give up its pretension to define justice; it becomes a republican democracy.

If globalization can be understood as contributing to the possible realization of the French political project, can the same be said for the phenomenon of exclusion? The right to difference could be criticized for putting an ideological halo on what global capital does on its own. But societies are political bodies that determine for themselves, politically, the role of the economy; otherwise they would be corporations whose well-being is measured by their bottom line. If France has become a pawn in a globalized economy, this was the effect rather than the cause of the corruption of the republic. This means that the political treatment of the problem of exclusion (including its economic causes) presupposes the elimination of that corruption by the creation of a republican democracy. The independence of the judicial magistrate is a first step. Its effect is to guarantee that members of society are autonomous individuals whose rights are assured by law. Only such individuals have the ability to become members of a political society. It is not enough to provide all citizens with economic necessities; recognition of what Hannah Arendt called “the right to have rights” is fundamental to the integration of the members of a republican democracy. Only under these conditions can individuals organize themselves to make demands on a state that not only ensures their symbolic community by protecting their real rights but also—like the incarnate monarch—is expected to hear the needs of the society. The magistrates’ ability to appeal to the law against the state, making the state just another particular interest, is essential for the state to acquire the legitimacy needed to play its unitary republican role (by being open to the society and to the economy while still uniting social diversity) without falling prey to the accusation of arbitrariness that, in the end, brought down the ancien régime. To be both unitary and yet diverse is the definition and the difficulty of democracy.

APPENDIX: FRENCH ECONOMIC THEORY AS POLITICAL

Although its vanity has cost French theory some of its currency among literary and cultural critics, it could be usefully replaced by the contributions of a creative group of French economists working in the historical and political tradition described here. At a moment when rational choice theory in its various guises is attempting to lay claim to the status of a general theory of social (and even of private) life, the French approach could be seen as offering the foundation for a counterattack. They are returning to the old motifs of political economy to challenge the antipolitical, thick-headed attempt to maintain the purity of an imperious economic logic that is incapable of admitting its own limits. A successful counterattack would mark points in the attempt to set limits to those aspects of globalization that threaten the foundations on which the economy rests as well as the goals that it claims to pursue.

The French approach is composed of many threads, which I will try briefly to knit together. The authors who have contributed to it write in both technical-academic and more popular journals. Their work of course also takes into account the general debates in the field of economics as practiced across national frontiers. A recent review article that provides a useful overview, “Penser ensemble l’économie et la société: La sociologie économique,” by Jean-Louis Laville and Benoît Levesque, cites nearly as many English-language authors as it does French in its seventy-five dense footnotes.⁴⁴ One note, however (n. 54) gives away the French strategy when it seeks to translate Karl Polanyi’s key concept of “embeddedness.” Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944) sought to understand why the Great Depression that followed the 1929 crash was more than just a cyclical crisis. Polanyi tried to show the historical uniqueness of the autonomous market for goods and services (including the market for wage labor) as the foundation of a new and artificial type of society. This artificially maintained market distinguished capitalism from all other known human societies in which the economy was subordinated to other dimensions of social relations: it was embedded. The Great Depression could be seen as the revenge of real social relations over the artificial market that had sought to impose its logic without taking account of the resistance of the actual society and the people who made it work. It represented a civilizational crisis.

The concept of embeddedness poses a translation problem because Polanyi’s insight can be read modestly or more radically. The modest interpretation simply points out that what appear to be purely economic phenomena—for example, prices or job creation—have a social dimension that needs to be taken into account. This social dimension is studied by economic sociology. It shows that prices are not natural, any more than demand is some fixed physical sum determined by unchanging human needs; otherwise there would be no advertising industry. As a result, economic sociology can criticize the assumption of neoclassical economics that economic agents are benefit-maximizing subjects provided with perfect information about the conditions and results of their choices. The modesty of this interpretation is suggested by the translation of embeddedness as étayage, which implies the existence of two independent factors whose interaction cannot be neglected by the analysis. This point has been evident to economic sociologists since Max Weber, whose “methodological individualism” did not ignore the environment in which the individual had to function.

A more radical translation of the concept of embeddedness goes back to the founder of French sociology, Emile Durkheim, for whom the individual, as well as the economy, is always, despite surface appearances, subordinated to the social whole. The concept should be translated as encastrement, suggesting that the economic can never dominate over its environment and that its apparent autonomy is an illusion that needs to be shown its limits. The priority accorded to the social does not exclude the individual; it does not strip the individual of its autonomy; nor is it incompatible with a market society. Durkheim’s theory is called functionalist because it assumes that the kinds of individual encountered in every society are formed by—and function to ensure the preservation of—that society. For this kind of theory, the rationally choosing neoclassical economic actor is not a presupposition; the theory has to ask why and how that type of individual came to dominate in a given type of society.⁴⁵

This French interpretation of Polanyi’s concept of embeddedness has practical implications. Bernard Perret, the former head of evaluation for the French Plan, offered a simple suggestion in the very title of a 1994 book: L’économie contre la société.⁴⁶ Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin drew the political and critical consequences in his reply to the June 2000 White Paper on European Socialism proposed by Tony Blair and Gerhardt Schröder: “Yes to the market, no to the society based on the market.” Jospin’s formula is eloquently terse; its practical implementation remains to be seen.

The early appearances of this French orientation date to the late 1970s, when what was called the school of regulation developed the concept of Fordism to designate a specific phase of capitalist social development that went beyond the nineteenth-century economic model analyzed by Marx. The concept of Fordism was intended to be more precise and analytic than competing categories such as welfare capitalism, postindustrial society, or Habermas’s Weberian-Marxist concept of late capitalism. Since economies that are embedded in social relations obey forms of regulation that are both explicit and implicit, the task of economic analysis is to uncover and compare types of regulation. For example, Fordism designates a mode of social reproduction in which constantly increasing output makes it possible to pay increasing wages for jobs guaranteed over the long term. In exchange for these gains, the capitalists earn the cooling of class conflict, while workers pay the price of losing their claim to control the organization of labor. The appeal of this analytic approach to authors such as Michel Aglietta, Robert Boyer, or Alain Lipietz is that when patterns of capitalist accumulation change, this will result in a double crisis—on the side of labor and on the side of capital. Labor can no longer be bought off with better wages, while capital will have to invent a new ideology of deregulation in order to regain dominance.

The school of regulation can be seen as developing a twentieth-century version of Marxist political economy. But the approach is not narrowly Marxist. Its insights have been drawn more broadly as a theory of conventions, developed by Jean-Pierre Dupuy and André Orléan.⁴⁷ The notion of “conventions” refers to patterns of regulation that can be either explicit or implicit; these patterned relations form conventions that serve to coordinate anticipations and permit arbitration among conflicting interests. In this way, conventions (or regulations) permit a transition between the levels of micro- and macroanalysis without appeal to the artificial and abstract subject and the invisible hand of market economies. The conventional regulations are part of the everyday expectations of market participants, who for that reason are not just the disembodied actors portrayed by rationalist economic logic: they are embedded.

The advantage of this approach is that the relation of social to economic change can be studied without the risk of one-sided reductionism; each depends on and presupposes the other. Instead of talking about a general economic mode of production applicable in every society regardless of its history and its resources, the goal is to “explain both the geographical diversity of capitalisms and the variations in the temporal configuration of social forms. It thus produces a more precise periodization than those that previously existed and shows the specificity that has characterized postwar growth.”⁴⁸ If one form of social regulation—say, Fordism—fails, another must be assumed to replace it if chaos is not to result. The new form may be more stable, but its costs and benefits have for their part also to be analyzed critically.

From this perspective, the global economy is not simply denounced as a “horror” (as suggested by title of the best-selling screed of Viviane Forrestier).⁴⁹ It is a form of regulation resulting from a series of compromises among social actors. “The notion of a mode of regulation that is supposed to explain a period of relative stability and the irruption of crises refers to a coherent ensemble formed by different social relations, institutional dispositions, productive techniques, and organizations that ensure regular economic growth and the stability of social functioning.”⁵⁰ If Anthony Giddens has pushed Tony Blair to move “beyond left and right,” French economists are proposing to their politicians the project of a new social contract that is not simply economic.⁵¹

This French holistic model suggests the need to analyze social movements politically. This approach differs from the American sociological analysis of such movements that reduces them to either the quest for identity by neglected interests or the opportunistic mobilization of power resources. Reductionist accounts, even when they intend to lend support to these movements, undermine them by adopting such an antipolitical view. The French proposal situates these movements within given forms of regulation while asking how they can culminate in the establishment of new types of regulation that can be as different as formal contracts, legislative decisions, or local and informal rules of the game that legitimate decisions politically. Whereas the sociological perspective reduces social movements to the ends they are assumed to seek and then judges them in terms of the criteria imputed to the movement by the analyst, the approach of French political economy avoids such means-ends judgments in favor of the functional analysis of an embedded socioeconomic self-regulation (from which, of course, crisis and conflict are not excluded).

The analysis of the welfare state as itself simply another form of regulation provides a counterpart to the account of social movements. The difficulties facing the modern state are not just the financial result of its ability to increase taxes in difficult economic times. If Fordism was the result of a compromise that promised good wages and job security in exchange for workers’ nonparticipation, this implicit compromise was regulated explicitly by the old welfare state. The new social contract would be a compromise in which the workers—or perhaps the users of the services “produced” in what is increasingly a service economy—can play a more active role. One need not assume that the cost to the workers would be a loss of security or that the gains of the capitalists would be paid in the coin of deregulated globalism. When bureaucratic administrations are no longer expected to satisfy the needs of clients who are passive consumers, the need for nonmarket social relations to solve problems posed by the marketization of society becomes evident. The form that will be invented cannot of course be predicted in advance.

A final, more philosophical-political dimension of the French theory should be considered. Durkheim’s most important successor, Marcel Mauss, developed his uncle’s insights in a short essay on “The Gift.”⁵² The modern economy based on market-mediated exchange-values is embedded in more primordial social (and political) relations regulated by the giving (and receiving) of gifts. Indeed, we repeat the same archaic gesture when we offer our hosts flowers or a good bottle of wine. It would be short-sighted to interpret our gift as an exchange for the hospitality we are to be offered. Some relations are and can only be noneconomic; their logic or rationale is antiutilitarian, but without it our social relations would lose their coherence. This insight and its implications have been the theme developed over the past decades by Alain Caillé and the journal he edits, the Revue du MAUSS (whose title is an acronym for Mouvement anti-utilitaire en sciences sociales). Not surprisingly, many of the political economists to whom I have referred here have published in that journal. Perhaps more surprising is the fact that similar themes have been taken up by the liberal capitalist prophet of “the end of history,” Francis Fukuyama, whose recent new book, Trust, is subtitled The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity.⁵³

This nonutilitarian (and nonmarket) dimension of the reproduction of social relations can also be applied to the proposal to treat the problems of the welfare state by noneconomic means. An example of that approach, coming this time from the state, can be seen in the decision of the then Socialist prime minister Michel Rocard to introduce the so-called RMI or “minimum revenue of [societal] insertion.” Rocard, the leader of the so-called second left, made the assumption that social integration must be assured if the society, and therefore the economy, is to function to its fullest capacity. It should be noted, however, that the RMI has been criticized by those who see it as simply functional to the needs of the economy. These critics propose instead, for example, the notion of a “citizen wage,” to which each is entitled, simply in order to ensure the continued functioning of the polity. Other critics contest the automatic nature of the benefit, which doesn’t demand individual effort at self-betterment. The debate is both practical and theoretical, sociological and philosophical—for the good of all participants. Its importance need not be stressed here.

A final contribution to this constellation of French economic theory should be mentioned, although its author stands deliberately outside the mainstream (as he always has). Living in retirement outside Parisian debates and writing often in German rather than French, André Gorz has suggested arguments that fall within the new paradigm described here—but he has done so on the basis of his original, and critical, Sartrean reading of Marx. For example, his most recent book, Misères du présent: Richesse du possible (1997),⁵⁴ makes use of Marx’s basic analysis of the commodity—as a dual phenomenon, having both use-value and exchange-value—to show how the capitalist stress on exchange-values alone robs society of the vast potential use-values that are produced by that same capitalism. The relationship to the original insight of Polanyi is evident. The Marx who thereby joins the new French political economy is not the economist but rather the social and thus political analyst of modern social relations in their uniqueness and in their inherently unstable form.