Look, I know the whole point of blogging current events is to offer thought and insight on the news as it happens, but since I’ve yet to get the “thought and insight” part, there’s really no point to hew too tightly to timeliness. My tardiness is probably more horrendously apparent now, as The New York Times posted this weekend’s magazine profile ofFrançois Hollande this morning while my target is its shorter article on Jean-Luc Mélanchon from almost four days ago.
The headline calls attention to the popularity of the Front de Gauche’s candidate in this year’s presidential elections, dubbing it the “sound and fury" of an angry electorate. The allusion makes a lot of sense; the candidate apparently loves Faulkner and has almost no electoral upside. In his absolute best case, he’ll pull a lefty version of Le-Pen-in-2002 and make the run-off, only to lose to whichever of the more moderate candidates joins him there. For all the vitriol surrounding his candidacy – the article mostly centers on a massively well-attended rally in Lille and his fringe-winning poll numbers – there won’t be much follow through. Even in the extremely unlikely scenario where Mélanchon moves into the Elysée, one can imagine that he won’t or couldn’t really go about “raising the minimum wage 20 percent to $2,200 a month, confiscating all income above $470,000 a year and banning profitable companies from laying off any workers.” The Fifth Republic might be an elected monarchy, but it’s not that much of an absolute one.
There’s something in the moniker that implies an emptiness underneath the words and a clear message from the reporter that we should take Mélanchon’s moving and shaking only as a barometer of popular discontent. It’s a valid and important point, but an unfair one. There’s something deeper underneath the rhetoric. Mélanchon’s invocation of the past, and particularly of the Revolutionary tradition, expresses something more than frustration with the present, a deeper longing to reclaim particular narrative. It speaks to a sense of destiny embedded in a national past and a dream, however utopian, to bond again with that timeline.
At first glance, some of the candidate’s moves might seem like the Gallic equivalent of the Tea Party, rife with empty invocations of a revolutionary past, attaching significations to historical symbols with little regard to how they work on anything but the barest emotional plane. To the outside observer, Mélanchon’s “prise de la Bastille” might seem to be just that, the Bastille (or at least the column and opera that stand now its stead) acting as a thin historical veneer, an attempt to put words on to raging populist emotion. But, as Arun Kapil points out in a comment to his originalpost on the event and furthers with meta-coverage in his follow-up, the day strung together a rich array of historical signifiers, using the Faubourg- Saint-Antoine streets trodden by the most radical of the sans-culottes, convening on the anniversary of the Paris Commune’s birth, all while Mélanchon invoked the names of dead socialists in a manner compared by many to that of Charles De Gaulle. The equation adds up to a thicker narrative and appeal to heritage than the Tea Party, even at its most erudite.
Further, as many commentators pointed out, the events of the day plucked at a revolutionary/republican/socialist fiber that has resonated over and over again at different frequencies and periods in French History since the last Estates-General. The appeal here is not a dream (nightmare?) jump to a restore point in a drive to “take the country back,” but to a constant movement towards a better nation and world. It’s an invocation of history with a real history. When Mélanchon speaks of “civil insurrection,” he speaks not just his own rallies and campaign, but of May ‘68, the Commune, the June Days, the July Revolution, and any number of the journées in those first tumultuous years after 1789. When he tells the crowds that “once again, you will have to be the crater from which the new flame of revolution erupts, lighting the fire of contagion that will become the common cause of the peoples of Europe,” he’s using a particularly revolutionary language, imagining itself as a force of nature, an undeniable violent force bound to spread across world. He enunciates it now with a little less ambition, sticking only to the continent - “If Europe is a volcano, France is the crater of all European revolutions!” – but the message of mounted messiahs remains the same.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that one of the reasons I’m particularly drawn to how the past operates in the present is that I always had a hard time (still mostly do) believing that history actually happened. It’s obvious, then, why I find all of this so very cool, even exotic. For these references to have the emotional and intellectual pull that they do (and if you doubt it, read some of the professional responses collected in Kapil’s second post) indicates not only a wholly perceived conception of the past but a deep and real connection to it. So, though I’m pretty sure I’m not a communist, I find this all very cool.
Though not without reservation - there are and were no clean historical narratives. I’m sure that Tony Judt rolls in his grave when General-Secretary of the French Communist Party tells the Times that “most of our militants haven’t experienced the Stalin period; this historical burden is behind us,” while in the next breath invokes the glory days of Leon Blum’s Popular Front, made possible by orders from, you guessed it, Josef Stalin. For all the excitement, emotion and sense of destiny that can come from extended length and strength of the Revolutionary fiber - and that offers a tantalizing counterpoint to the near-nihilistic moment-politics of opportunity over here – there’s a danger of using a bluntly viewed past as a crutch.
Take for example one of the slogans of the March 18 prise, “Vite, le 6e République” – something of a call to insurrection, to a complete re-ordering the body politic. Of the five republics thus far, only the first two came as a result of popular uprising (a generous accounting: the first being pretty much invited by the collapse of Ancien Regime). Even measured sympathetically, neither of them lasted a decade and both ended in dictatorships. It can be so easy to see a chain of Revolutionary advances and to celebrate them without nuance, but to forget the messiness of their times risks ignoring the complexity of our own.* The Revolutionary tradition can be kind of awesome, can provide the values that might undergird our approaches to the problems that threaten our future, but it can’t and won't solve them.
*Lewis Lapham has a great essay on this subject in the latest issue of Harper's. I'd post a link, but it's not up on the web yet.
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