88
PARTISAN REVIEW
and out agam, more in sorrow than in anger, when the government
began to lose its breath, as all French governments must, from pushing
at the Sisyphan rock of the National Assembly. Having returned to the
back benches, Mendes-France and his friends, under the benevolent if
slightly clouded eye of old Herriot, proceeded to take over the Radical
Party in preparation for the 1956 elections. The new radicalism needed
a daily organ and
L'Express
was ready to hand. There was a brief
fund-raising campaign and, while Paris held its breath,
L'Express
be–
came a daily.
Paris held its breath because the enterprise was risky and "every–
body," whatever he thought of Mendes-France, suddenly discovered
that he had some interest in the success or failure of this little newspaper.
The point is that
L'Express
had and continues to have a peculiar relation
to that ubiquitous freemasonry, the worldly "everybody" of Paris.
It
titillates, irritates, outrages, ravishes; but, above all, it belongs.
Does that sound invidious? I'm sorry. We are a long way from
the rustic old
bien de chez nous
air of the Radical Party and-who
knows?-we may even be departing from ideology itself. And that is
why I believe that the movement around
L'Express
may turn out to
be a truly original reaction to what is really going on. The paper is
not very good and its circulation, I've been told, has fallen disastrously
after the first few days.
It
may scarcely survive the elections which, as
I write this letter, Edgar Faure is organizing into a series of elephant–
traps for Pierre Mendes-France. But whether or not it survives,
L'Express
has already helped precipitate an intellectual regrouping which began
before the immediate political conjuncture and will surely playa role
when that conjuncture is past.
'
The old rhetoric is still there, in the paper, and Camus is the chief
purveyor of it, sternly demanding purity and virtue on a back page,
three times a week. Thus, when the nationalized Renault automobile
factories award a new labor contract providing for better wages and
three weeks of paid annual vacations, Camus somberly comments on the
"inhumanity of the wage system" and calls for a "community of labor"
to redeem man from the indignity of the pay envelope and the tyranny
of the assembly line. Or he asks his reader to give thought to the op–
pressed Algerians and the starving workers instead of indulging in an
unseemly pother about Princess Margaret's thwarted marriage. But
along with all this-and Fran<;ois Mauriac, too !-there is something
quite new, namely a concern with political economy as something other
than a minor branch of literature; an awareness that the social sciences
did not end with Marx, Lamenais, and Auguste Comte; and, inevitably,
