Unlike in the France of the Third and even the Fourth Republics, I no longer felt at ease in the France of de Gaulle and his Gaullist successors, or in the France of Mitterrand, the France that developed a new kind of public rhetorical jargon where politicians called their country the ‘Hexagone ’, talked of ‘la France profonde’ and showed their energy by forging ahead ‘tous azimuths’, in which Paris became one gigantic gentrified bourgeois ghetto, the largest in Europe, where the street-corner bars were shut at weekends because the old people of Paris could no longer afford to live there, although they worked there on weekdays. Except for the great hole in the centre left by the emigration of the markets and filled by Richard Rogers’s Beaubourg, the city remained more or less recognizable until President Mitterrand filled and surrounded it with his architectural dinosaurs. (The General, knowing that his place in history was secure, had disdained trying to preserve his memory by monumental architecture.) Paris remains as wonderful a city as ever for the tourist, but it is hard for a historian to get used to the fact that the left can no longer elect more than the odd councillor in the home of the Paris Commune, unless the corruption of the right-wing municipal administrations has temporarily become too scandalous. On the other hand, nobody living in Britain could fail to appreciate the advantages of French postwar modernization, which supplemented the unchanging quality and variety of French food-markets and cooking with the TGV and a superb system of public urban and suburban transport.
I learned, at first reluctantly, to appreciate the greatness of the General and to develop a taste for his style. I learned, with even greater reluctance, to respect Mitterrand. Neither could have flourished in the Third Republic. Both came out of the milieu of what the Third Republic would have (rightly) called ‘reaction’. De Gaulle was a man of the right, but one for whom the Republic, including its left, was an essential part of that ‘certain idea of France’ which he recreated after the war. He was the first French politician since 1793 whose France had a place both for the monarchy and the Revolution. Indeed, he was presumably not entirely displeased to be compared with Louis XIV, who would have addressed his servants much as de Gaulle addressed the publisher who edited his memoirs, when the man admitted to a rather un-Gaullist past between 1940 and 1944. ‘I take it,’ said the great man (who may well have had the relevant files looked up), ‘that you have been inside one of my prisons.’ Both the personal pronoun and the plural are very much de Gaulle.12
Since his death there has been much criticism of the ambiguities and complexities of François Mitterrand’s career. Yet it cannot be denied that it moved leftwards with surprisingly little discontinuity, from the pre-war ultra-right through Vichy and the Resistance to a political progress that turned him into the builder and chief of a reconstructed Socialist Party which recaptured control of the left not by isolating the communists in the usual Cold War manner, but by bringing him to power in alliance with them. In both Third and Fourth Republics politicians would have moved in the opposite direction. He and de Gaulle belong to an era – no, both were architects of the era – when French politics ceased to be essentially a battle about the great Revolution whose memory divided the left from the right, though both men knew in their bones that the Revolution was as central to the France they ruled as the American Constitution was to the USA. In this they were more realistic than the ideologists of moderate liberalism, immoderate anti-communism and market society, always an untypical minority in France, who came to dominate Parisian intellectual fashions in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
And yet, if I did not feel at ease in Gaullist and Mitterrandist France, I could understand its continuity with my own France, the blue-white-and-red tricoloured ‘remembered hills’ of the past. In one way or another, the France of the Canard Enchainé was not yet dead. Indeed, the scandals and the growing corruption in the later Gaullist and the later Mitterrand eras revived the fortunes of this publication.
Nor did I feel at ease with the intellectual mood of the time. Like everyone on the global left, I was excited by the rebellion of 1968 but I remained sceptical. True, I was in much closer touch with French historians, who formed the core discipline of the French social sciences until the 1970s, and who supplied so many of Hamon and Rotman’s Parisian ‘intellocrats’. 2 Nevertheless, in some ways I had lost touch with many of the currents of French culture and theoretical discussion after the 1960s, and, although any admirer of Queneau and Perec cannot but be sympathetic to the French intellectual tradition of playing games with language, as French thinkers increasingly moved into the territory of ‘postmodernism’ I found them uninteresting, incomprehensible, and in any case of not much use to historians. Even their puns failed to grip.
After the brief 1968 surge, in the 1970s and 1980s the left, both old and new, was clearly on the retreat in France. My opinion of the French Communist Party since 1945 had never been high, and I had long regarded its leadership under George Marchais as a disaster, yet it would be dishonest of me not to admit that its decline from the great mass Party of the French working class to a rump of less than 4 per cent of voters caused an old communist pain. And it would be equally dishonest not to admit that most of what has remained under the label ‘Marxism’ in France is unimpressive. On the other hand, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, the increasingly militant and ill-tempered anti-communism of so many of the formerly left-wing ‘intellocrats’ began to complicate my relations with some of them. Though we respected and sometimes liked each other, some of those with whom I had dealings in Paris, intellectual or social, were politically uneasy in my company, and I in theirs. Since I remained what I had been since 1956, a known, though heterodox communist whose work had never been published in the USSR, some, who might have been more Stalinist or even Maoist in their youth than I ever was, resented what they regarded as a wilful refusal to take the same road. I, in turn, found myself more repelled by the Cold War rhetoric and free market liberalism to which some of the ablest and most prestigious were drawn in the 1980s than by the straightforward return of a man like Le Roy Ladurie (a major historian by any standards) to the traditional conservatism of his Norman ancestry. Paradoxically, as Communist Parties declined, the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union and its empire collapsed, the tone of anti-communist and anti-Marxist polemic became more embittered, not to say hysterical. The late François Furet, a historian and publicist of great intelligence and influence – perhaps the nearest thing to a chef d’ecole of the tendency – did his best to turn the second centenary of the French Revolution into an intellectual assault on it. A few years later his Le passé d’une illusion presented the history of the twentieth century as that of the process of liberation from the dangerous dream of communism. Not surprisingly, I criticized his views.3 As a by now quite well-known Marxist historian, I found myself for a while a champion of the embattled and besieged French intellectual left.
This complicated relations further, especially since, by chance, my own history of the twentieth century, The Age of Extremes, appeared just before Furet’s book. While it was accepted on its merits and received calmly even by notably conservative reviewers in other countries, in France it was seen – at least by an influential part of the intellocrats – essentially as a work of political ideological polemics directed against anti-communist liberals. Though discussed (in its English version) in intellectual journals, it was not translated, on the ostensible grounds that it was too expensive to translate for its necessarily small market. The argument was implausible, since the book had already sold well in every other western language. Indeed, such was the curious self-absorption of the French intellectual scene in those years that French was for several years the only language of the member-states of the European Union, and indeed the only global culture-language (including Chinese and Arabic) in which the book was not published or contracted to be published. It finally came out in France in 1999, thanks to the initiative of a Belgian publisher and the active help of one of the few unrepentant publications of the left, Le Monde Diplomatique. Perhaps the ideological mood had changed since Lionel Jospin, who put less strain on the conscience of the French left than the dying Mitterrand, took over as prime minister in 1997. It was received well enough by the critics. The potential reviewers of the early nineties kept silent or had buried their hatchets. It sold rather satisfactorily, at least for a while. It brought me more personal letters from unknown readers scattered across the map of France than any of the other translations of this much-translated work. And it enabled an ancient Francophile, whose love affair with the tradition of the French left began on a newsreel truck on Bastille Day 1936, to round it off sixty-three years later with another suitably symbolic experience in the Grand Amphitheatre of the Sorbonne, once the only university of Paris, now the parent of a family, packed with Parisians who had been invited to listen to a debate on my newly published book. Very few of the people who came in sufficient numbers to crowd the enormous auditorium had read any of my books which, as the publishers who refused me always reminded me, had only had a succès d’estime in the hexagonal market. What brought them there was the fact that someone – it happened to be me – spoke frankly, critically, sceptically, but impenitently, and not without pride for those who stood for a left in which the old distinctions of party and orthodoxy no longer counted. I like to think that on this occasion I was present at a sort of re-emergence, however brief, of a Parisian intellectual left from a period of siege.