232
PARTISAN REVIEW
Marion Oliner:
What about the importance that religion and the
church have in this country, as against its being a negligible factor in
France? Don't we have to take into account the tremendous in–
fluence that religious fanaticism sometimes has here when we talk
about right and left?
Dominique Schnapper:
You're correct. We don't have these religious
passions that you have in the United States . We had them in the
nineteenth century . We now have a Catholic Church that is doing
social work and does not always seem to believe in God ; Protestant
churches have never really existed in France; and the Jews have no
church.
Bernard Grossman:
To return to the question of morality and politics,
an issue here, for example, was not our selling arms but the fact that
our president had made a personal crusade that we would never sell
to terrorists.
Dominique Schnapper:
Well , we are so used to politicians' lies that we
are not shocked. That is a rather cynical position of the French, I
know, and completely different from the American attitude . Of
course the President lied.
Bernard Grossman:
Are there other ethical qualities that the French
look for in a politician?
Dominique Schnapper:
You have to
look
respectable . Six months after
Giscard d'Estaing had been elected president , he came back around
six o'clock in the morning driving his own car, and he had a problem
with a milk truck. I don't know how it got there because milk no
longer is delivered to anyone in France, but that is the story. The
fact that he had been with another woman rather than his wife was
not shocking, but he shouldn't have let on about it. The French were
not shocked by the fact that the President of the United States most
probably lied; there was no moral reaction. I can't tell you what went
on in people's souls, but it was not expressed. There was a famous
story about Giscard's diamonds, a stupid story , stupid for him; there
was no moral reaction as there would have been in America.
Dennis Wrong:
What about the current kind of high-level argument
over what is called postmodernism, which seems to line up Haber–
mas and various other people in Germany , in some sense on the left,
against the conservatism of the very people I thought you placed on
the left, in the tradition of Lacan, Derrida, Bourdieu .
Dominique Schnapper:
Oh , they are on the left.
Dennis Wrong:
But the Germans here come out as the defenders of the
project of modernity and the possibility of some future transforma-
