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tion must take it into account if only to attack it. The arrival on the
political scene of the very young Laurent Fabius as prime minister,
with his moderate and pragmatic orientation, marks an attempt on
the part of the socialists to turn their backs on three years of populist
rhetoric incarnated by Pierre Mauroy. But will his presence substan–
tially solve the socialist identity crisis?
The past is not dead and buried in French consciousness, and
nowhere is it more alive than inside the left, whose every action
seems to take place with the French Revolution as a backdrop. It is
therefore not surprising that French socialism would seek its new
cultural political identity not in the future (as Giscard had done),
despite the government's fascination with modern technology, but in
the past, more precisely in the venerable tradition of
La Republique.
The term
La Republique
does not stand for the French Revolu–
tion after the beheading of Louis XVI, or for the short-lived revolu–
tionary replay of 1848. In French political consciousness,
La Repub–
lique
is the Third Republic, more precisely its first constitutive half
from 1875 up to World War
I.
During this period, the Third
Republic slowly fashioned a national consensus against the monar–
chist right and against the Church in the name of progressive democ–
racy and equality based on the "1789" heritage of the French Revolu–
tion (the Rights of Man). The "1793" heritage (Robespierre and the
Terror) was laid aside when not discarded by a republic which had
condemned the 1871 Paris Commune.
The return to the tradition of
La Republique
among present-day
socialists is thus politically and culturally significant. It marks an at–
tempt on all sides
(La Deuxieme Gauche
as well as CERES, and all the
more so the Mitterrandistes in power) to find meaning for their
governing beyond the daily stumbling blocks of economic reality,
not in fruitless revolutionary quests, but in a project of national
solidarity and social progress based on hallowed republican institu–
tions, foremost among which is the State and its noble emanation,
"Le Service Public."
The loose constellation of left-wing antitotalitarian, anti-diri–
giste
social innovators who advocated economic rigor and modernity
in international competition - known as
La Deuxieme Gauche
-
suffered
the greatest loss of cultural-political identity from the socialist ex–
perience of power. The economic rigor may have succeeded under
Jacques Delors, but the social utopias have failed, and the critical
role of
La Deuxieme Gauche
was increasingly taken over by a dynamic
neoliberal camp.
La Deuxieme Gauche,
however, faced its greatest setback in social
