Les lieux de mémoire was an enormous critical and public success, and in due course became the model for not a few imitations abroad. But it was always plain that it must count as one of the most patently ideological programmes in post-war historiography anywhere in the world. It was Renan, after all, who had famously defined a nation as much by what it had to forget—the slaughter of sixteenth-century Protestants and thirteenth-century Albigensians were his examples—as to remember: a caution it might have been thought all the more difficult to ignore a century later. Yet Nora could cheerfully introduce his enterprise with the words:
Even though tolerably well thought-out—in keeping with the required typology, the state of scientific knowledge of the questions, and the competences available to deal with them—the choice of subjects contains an element of the arbitrary. Let us accept it. Such complaisance in our favourite imaginaries undeniably involves a risk of intellectual regression and a return to that Gallocentrism which contemporary historiography fortunately endeavours to transcend. We should be aware of this, and on our guard against it. But for the moment, let us forget it [sic]. And let us wish, for this handful of fresh and joyous essays—soon to be followed by armfuls more—a first innocent reading.21
The effect of these convenient protocols, as not a few Anglophone historians pointed out,22 was to repress memories, not just of social divisions, but even, largely, of such inescapable symbols of the political past—their monuments literally astride the nation’s capital—as Napoleon and his nephew: figures presumably no longer relevant in the ‘decentralized, modern’ France, at rest within the ‘pacific, plural’ Europe celebrated by Nora. More widely, the entire imperial history of the country, from the Napoleonic conquests through the plunder of Algeria under the July Monarchy, to the seizure of Indochina in the Second Empire, and the vast African booty of the Third Republic, becomes a non-lieu at the bar of these bland recollections. Both Nora and Furet had been courageous critics of the Algerian War in their youth.23 But by the time they came to embalm the nation thirty years later, each had eliminated virtually any reference to its external record from their retrospections. One would scarcely know, from Furet’s history of the nineteenth century, that France had a colonial empire at all, let alone that his particular hero Jules Ferry was the Rhodes of the Third Republic. Nora’s volumes reduce all these fateful exertions to an exhibition of tropical knick-knacks in Vincennes. What are the lieux de mémoire that fail to include Dienbienphu?
Wrapping up the project eight years later, Nora noted criticisms made of it, and sought to turn them by complaining that although conceived as a ‘counter-commemoration’, his seven volumes had been integrated into a self-indulgent heritage culture, of whose vices he had always been well aware, but which would remain pervasive as long as France had not found a firm new footing in the world.24 This ingenious sophistry could not really conceal, after the fact, that the whole enterprise of Les lieux de mémoire was elegaic through and through: the antithesis of everything that Roland Barthes, no less fascinated by icons, but more concerned with a critical theory of them, had offered in Mythologies, deconstructing the emblems of francité—a coinage Nora at one point even borrows, divested of its spirit—with a biting irony remote from this erudition of patriotic appeasement, published with expressions of gratitude to the Ministry of Culture and Communications.25All too plainly, the underlying aim of the project, from which it never departed, was the creation of a union sucrée in which the divisions and discords of French society would melt away in the fond rituals of post-modern remembrance.
The intellectual limitations of an undertaking are one thing. Its political efficacy is another. The orchestral programme of which Nora and Furet were the lead conductors in these years is best described as the enthronement of liberalism as an all-encompassing paradigm of French public life. In this contemporary design they could draw on the legacy of the great French liberal thinkers of the early nineteenth century: above all Constant, Guizot and Tocqueville, whose works were waiting to be rediscovered and put to active modern use.26 This was not the least important labour of the anti-totalitarian front of the time, and good scholarly work resulted, in the service of constructing a perfectly legitimate pedigree. Still, there was an ironic contrast between forebears and descendants. Under the Restoration and the July Monarchy, France produced a body of liberal political thought substantially richer than England, let alone America in the same period. But as a political force, liberalism was incomparably weaker. The mishaps of its leading minds—the repeated contrast between noble ideas and shabby actions—were the symptom of that discrepancy: Constant the turncoat of the Hundred Days, Tocqueville the hangman of the Roman Republic, two champions of liberty who connived at successive Napoleonic tyrannies; Guizot the frigid mechanic of exclusion and repression, chased from the country amid universal reprobation. The discredit of such careers was one reason for the neglect that befell their writings after their deaths. But even in their own time, they never really caught the imagination of their contemporaries. Classical French liberalism was a fragile bloom, in ungrateful soil. A hundred and fifty years later, matters were very different. The comprehensive rehabilitation of liberal themes and attitudes that set in from the mid-1970s onwards produced no political thinkers to compare even to Aron. But what it lacked in original ideas, it more than made up for in organizational reach. The phrase la pensée unique, coined twenty years later—though like all such terms, involving an element of exaggeration—was not inaccurate as a gauge of its general dominance.
The international conjuncture, of course, formed a highly favourable environment for this turn: the global ascendancy of Anglo-American neo-liberalism offered a formidable backdrop to the French scene. But no other Western country saw quite so decisive an intellectual victory. The achievement was a national one, the fruit of a coordinated campaign waged with skill and determination by Furet, Nora and their allies across two decades. It combined institutional penetration and ideological construction in a single enterprise, to define the acceptable meanings of the country’s past and the permissible bounds of its present. Here, as nowhere else, history and politics interlocked in an integrated vision of the nation, projected across the expanse of public space. In this respect the Communist Party Historians Group in Britain, though its members were to be no less politically active, and produced much more innovative history, were tyros beside their French contemporaries. There has rarely been such a vivid illustration of just what Gramsci meant by hegemony. He would have been fascinated by every nook and cranny of Les lieux de mémoire, down to its entries on street-names, a favourite subject of his, or the local notary; and he would have admired the energy and imagination with which the legacy of the Jacobins, his heroes, was liquidated—feats of a ‘passive revolution’ more effective than the original Restorations of the nineteenth century themselves, around which so much of his theory in the Prison Notebooks was built. As if on cue, indeed, Furet ended his career with an obituary of communism as the rule of capital was restored in Russia, closing the century’s ‘socialist parenthesis’.
By comparison with the rest of Furet’s work, Le passé d’une illusion—flirting with the ideas of Ernst Nolte in its linkage of Bolshevism to Nazism, topics with which he had little prior acquaintance—was a pot-boiler. Appearing in 1995, it rehearsed so many Cold War themes long after the event that some wits remarked it read like the intellectual equivalent of a demand for reimbursement of the Russian loan.27 But this in no way affected its success in France. Acclaimed as a masterpiece by the media, it was an immediate best-seller, marking the height of Furet’s fame. With this sensational coping-stone in place, the arch of anti-totalitarian triumph seemed complete.
3
Nine months later, France was convulsed by the largest wave of strikes and demonstrations since 1968. The Juppé government, attempting under pressure from Brussels to push through a neo-liberal restructuring of social security arrangements, had provoked such popular anger that much of
the country was brought to a halt. The resulting political crisis lasted for six weeks and split the intellectual class down the middle. Virtually the entire anti-totalitarian coalition endorsed Juppé’s plans as a much-needed initiative to modernize what had become an archaic system of welfare privilege. Ranged against it, for the first time a consistent alternative spectrum of opinion materialized. Led by Bourdieu and others, it defended the strikers against the government.
Politically speaking, the confrontation between the palace and the street ended with the complete defeat of the regime. Juppé was forced to withdraw his reforms. Chirac jettisoned Juppé. The electors punished Chirac by giving a majority to Jospin. Intellectually, the climate was never quite the same again. A few weeks later Furet, playing tennis at his country house, fell dead on the court. He had just been elected to the Académie française, but had not yet had time to don the green and gold, grip his sword and be received among the Immortals.
But well before the end he had begun to express misgivings. Certainly, Gaullism and Communism were for all practical purposes extinct. The Socialist Party had abandoned its absurd nationalizations, and the intelligentsia had renounced its Marxist delusions. The Republic of the Centre he wished for had come into being. But the political architect of this transformation, whose rule had coincided with the ideological victories of moderate liberalism, and in part depended on them, was François Mitterrand. Furet’s judgement of him was severe. A genius of means, barren of ends, Mitterrand had indeed destroyed the PCF and forced the PS to accept the logic of the firm and the market. But he had also abused the spirit of the Constitution by installing the simulacrum of a royal court in the Elysée; he presided over a regime whose ‘intellectual electro-encephalogram is absolutely flat’; and he had signally failed to the rise to the world-historical occasion when Soviet Communism collapsed.28 It was impossible to feel any warmth for a presidency so cynical and void of ideas. Barre or Rocard, admired by the Fondation Saint-Simon, would have been preferable.
Behind this disaffection, however, lay a deeper doubt about the direction that French public life was taking. Already by the late eighties, Furet had started to express reservations about the discourse of human rights that was becoming ever more prominent in France, as elsewhere. Impeccably liberal though it might seem—it had, after all, been the pièce de résistance at the ideological banquet of the Bicentenary—the ideology of human rights did not amount to a politics. A contemporary surrogate for what had once been the ideals of socialism, it undermined the coherence of the nation as a form of collective being, and gave rise to inherently contradictory demands: the right to equality and the right to difference, proclaimed in the same breath. Its enthusiasts would do well to re-read what Marx had said about human rights.29 The increasing cult of them was narrowing the difference between French and American political life.
Closer acquaintance with the US sharpened rather than lessened these anxieties. Furet remained a staunch champion of the great power that had always been the bastion of the Free World. But from his observation post in Chicago, much of the scenery of Clinton’s America was off-putting, if not disturbing. Racial integration had paradoxically undone older black communities, and left ghettoes of a sinister misery with few equals in Europe. Sexual equality was advancing in America (as it was in Europe, if mercifully without the same absurdities), and it would change democratic societies. But it would neither transform their nature nor produce any new man, or woman. Political correctness was a kind of academic aping of class struggle. Crossed with the excesses of a careerist feminism, it had left many university departments in conditions to which only an Aristophanes or Molière could do justice. Multi-culturalism, as often as not combined with what should be its opposite, American juridification of every issue, led inevitably to a slack relativism. In the desert of political ideas under another astute but mindless president, the peculiar liberal variant of utopia it represented was spreading.30
Furet’s final reflections were darker still. His last text, completed just before he died, surveyed France in the aftermath of the elections called by Chirac that had unexpectedly given the PS a legislative majority—in his view, an almost incredible blunder by a politician he once thought had governed well. But Jospin offered little that was different from Juppé. Right and Left were united in evading the real issues before the country: the construction of Europe; the tensions around immigration; the persistence of unemployment, which could only be reduced by cutting social spending. Under Mitterrand, French public life had become a ‘depressing spectacle’, amid a general decomposition of parties and ideas. Now lies and impostures were the political norm, as voters demanded ever newer doses of demagogy, without believing in them, in a country that stubbornly ‘ignored the laws of the end of the century’.31
What were these laws? Historically, the Left had tried to separate capitalism and democracy, but they formed a single history. Democracy had triumphed since 1989, and with it capital. But its victory was now tinged with malaise, for it was accompanied by an ever vaster disengagement of its citizens from public life. It was impossible to view that withdrawal without a certain melancholy. Once communism had fallen, the absence of any alternative ideal of society was draining politics of passion, without leading to any greater belief in the justice of the status quo. Capitalism was now the sole horizon of humanity, but the more it prevailed, the more detested it became. ‘This condition is too austere and contrary to the spirit of modern societies to last’, Furet concluded. He ended in the spirit of Tocqueville, lucidly resigned to the probability of what he had resisted. ‘It might one day be necessary’, he conceded, ‘to go beyond the horizon of capitalism, to go beyond the universe of the rich and poor’. For however difficult it was even to conceive of a society other than ours today, ‘democracy, by virtue of its existence, creates the need for a world beyond the bourgeoisie and beyond Capital’.32
Inadvertently, then, the passing of an illusion had itself been the source of a disappointment. Victor of the Cold War it might be, but actually existing capitalism was an uninspiring affair. It was understandable that utopian dreams of a life without it had not vanished. In his last historical essay, Furet even forgot himself so far as to write once again of the ‘revolutionary bourgeoisie’ that had carried France out of the Ancien Régime, almost as if he now saw merit in the catechism he had so long denounced.33 Two centuries later, the dénouement he wished for had come, but it lay like so much clinker in his hands. A liberal Midas was left staring at what he had wanted.
Posthumously, if there were two sources of Furet’s final disarray, capitalism and the condition of his own country, it was to be the second that scattered his following. There had always been a tension within the new French liberalism between its political loyalty to America and its emotional attachments to France. Its project had envisaged an ideal union of the principles of the sister Republics of the Enlightenment. But e pluribus unum and ‘one and indivisible’ are mottoes at war with each other. For liberals, what counted for more? An atomistic individualism with no logical stopping-place, breaking the nation into so many rival micro-cultures, whose unification must become ever more formal and fragile? Or a collective identity anchored in common obligations and stern institutions, holding the nation resolutely—but perhaps also oppressively—together?
It was over this dilemma that the anti-totalitarian front fell apart. The first skirmish occurred in the early eighties, when Bernard-Henri Lévy announced that there was a generic ‘French Ideology’, stretching from Left to Right across the twentieth century, saturating the nation with anti-Semitism and crypto-fascism. This was too much for Le Débat, which demolished Lévy’s blunders and enormities in two blistering pieces, one by Le Roy Ladurie and the other by Nora (‘un idéologue bien de chez nous’), rebuffing attempts to discredit the Republic in the name of the Jewish question.34 The next occasion for dispute was, predictably enough, posed by the Muslim question, with the first affair of the foulards, in the late eightie
s. Could head-scarves be worn in schools without undermining the principles of a common secular education established by the Third Republic? This time the split was more serious, pitting advocates of a tolerant multi-culturalism, American-style, against upholders of the classical republican norms of a citizen nation.
Eventually, simmering ill-feeling over these issues burst into the open. In 2002, Daniel Lindenberg, a historian close to Esprit, unloosed a violent broadside against the authoritarian integrism, hostility to human rights and contempt for multi-culturalism of so many former fellow-fighters for French liberalism—notable among them leading lights of Le Débat and Commentaire. Such tendencies represented a new rappel à l’ordre, the eternal slogan of reaction. Lindenberg’s pamphlet, although a crude piece of work, recklessly amalgamating its various targets, not only received a warm welcome in Le Monde and Libération. It pointedly appeared in a collection edited by Furet’s colleague Pierre Rosanvallon, fellow architect of the Fondation Saint-Simon and co-author of La République du centre, recently promoted—many eyebrows had been raised—to the Collège de France. This was the signal for virtual civil war in the liberal camp, with a standard Parisian flurry of rival open letters and manifestoes, as Gauchet and his friends hit back in L’Express and columns of the press closer to them. The disintegration of the comity of the late seventies was complete.35
By then, however, a much larger change in its position had occurred. Furet’s misgivings at the upshot of modernization were a murmur against the background of more menacing sounds from the depths of the country. Among the masses, neo-liberalism à la française had not caught on. From 1983 onwards, when Mitterrand made the decisive turn towards the logic of financial markets, the French electorate had unfailingly rejected every government that administered this medicine to it. The pattern never varied. Under a Presidency of the Left, Fabius—the first Socialist premier to hail the new ‘culture of the firm’—was turned out in 1986; Chirac, who launched the first wave of privatizations for the Right, was rejected in 1988; Bérégovoy, Socialist pillar of the franc fort, was ousted in 1992; Balladur, personifying an Orleanist moderation in the pursuit of economic liberty, fell at the polls in 1995. Under a Presidency of the Right, Juppé—the boldest of these technocrats, who attacked social provisions more directly—was first crippled by strikes and then driven from office in 1997; Jospin—who privatized more than all his predecessors put together—thought that after five self-satisfied years of government he had broken the rule, only to be routed in the elections of 2002. Today Raffarin, after two years of dogged attempts to take up where Juppé left off, has already lost control of every regional administration in the country save Alsace, and sunk lower in the opinion polls than any prime minister in the history of the Fifth Republic. In twenty years, seven governments, lasting an average of less than three years apiece. All devoted, with minor variations, to similar policies. Not one of them re-elected.
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