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clinging strongly to the alliance with the Socialists, and its white–
collar and left-wing support eroding, the party shifted this year to a
nasty campaign against the concentrations of immigrant workers in
the Red Belt suburbs, an appeal to blue-collar prejudice that reminded
some observers of George Wallace. After Marchais's support of the
conquest of Afghanistan and his virtual blank check to the Soviets for
intervention in Poland, this overt racism was the last straw for some
party faithful, who had already spent several futile years in internal
opposition .
But the eclipse of Marxism extended to intellectuals who had
long ago dissociated themselves from the P.C.F. Some of the rea–
sons include: the success story of French society itself, though its
prosperity is far from equitably distributed; the appearance of tricky
new methodologies, with larger opportunities for self-display; and
above all the arrival of Freud as a powerful new force in many
academic disciplines. As socialist texts lose influence-and begin to
look old-fashioned or utopian-psychoanalytic writings glut the book
stalls, but without the monolithic impact of the old Marxist faith. For
resourceful French intellectuals, psychoanalysis has become a fashion–
able way of reinventing the world in new theoretical terms-terms
largely severed from therapeutic practice or empirical observation . Yet
this self-indulgence, however exasperating it can be to the average
intelligent reader, adds to the intellectual variety of the French scene
today.
It
is no accident that this new interest in the psyche and the
unconscious, previously dismissed as reactionary, should spread at a
time when bourgeois comforts are in-increasingly available even for
the working class-and revolutionary asceticism is out. Hidden in the
folds of the new affluence, with its inevitable Americanization, is the
old French hedonism . A few years ago Roland Barthes discovered that
art gives pleasure-a mystification of the old criticism that did not
endear him to his radical students. Yet it was very much a sign of the
times , when Pompidou was tearing down a good deal of old Paris, such
as the thirteenth arrondissement, to build flats with tile bathrooms and
central heating.
Marx est mort,
proclaimed one New Philosopher
prematurely, but the consumer society is thriving. The French have
embraced technology in a way that would warm the heart of corporate
America.
Americans in Paris today are still hooked, but not on quaint
narrow streets and cheap, out-of-the-way restaurants, both of which are
in short supply. Today's expatriates have money or jobs; they live in a
