MARK LILLA
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maining parliamentary representative out into the wilderness. The
trouble began with a simple, if brutal, pun that slipped off Le Pen's
lips during a speech . Asked to comment on Mitterrand's approach to
centrist parties, Le Pen chose to attack the minister placed in charge
of the
ouverture.
Playing off the minister's name, Durafour, Le Pen
sarcastically referred to him as
"Monsieur Durafour-Crematoire." (Afour–
crematoire
is a crematory oven.) Given Le Pen's documented anti–
Semitic past and his recent claims that the Holocaust was a mere
"detail" of World War II, the response to this latest outrage was im–
mediate and universal. The parties of the right refused all future
cooperation with the FN in the approaching local elections, robbing
Le Pen of the chance to revive his party locally after its national set–
backs. As a result, the cantonal elections held in October reflected
rather weak FN support (except in some troubled regions) and Le
Pen himself has been momentarily driven from the public stage.
There may be a future challenge to the admittedly fresh centrism of
the French electorate, but Jean-Marie Le Pen is unlikely to lead it.
Yet these short-term developments on the party landscape are
probably not the best measure of the slower, deeper transformations
that have been easing France towards the political center. A book
just published by Franc;:ois Furet and two colleagues makes this point
forcefully by placing the Mitterrand years at the end of three dif–
ferent epochs, beginning respectively with the Revolution, the
founding of the Third Republic (1870), and the end of World War
II . The book's title is the best summary of its conclusions :
La republi–
que
du centre: La fin de l'exception franfaise.
This "exceptionalism," ac–
cording to Furet, was the burden French republicanism had to carry
since its birth, first by overcoming monarchism and the Catholic
Church in the nineteenth century, then by rejecting Marxist chal–
lenges to its legitimacy in this century. The tenure of Franc;:ois Mit–
terrand, seen in this light, is a sign that both those challenges have
been successfully overcome and that, to repeat Furet's now famous
phrase,
"la revolutionfranfaise est terminie."
Whatever disturbing radical
or Poujadist movements develop on the margins of French political
debate, they are just that - marginal distractions, and not real chal–
lenges to republican legitimacy. France has finally joined the un–
questionably republican company of Great Britain and the United
States, and whether the French like it or not (and it is not clear that
they do), "French politics has lost its theatrical dimension."
DiJa
vu?
One strains not to draw comparisons with similar
predictions of American tranquility made in the 1960s, but the
