FRAN<;::OIS
FUI~ET
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festival of "counter-revolutionary" revolutions. For what finally expired
in 1989, under the guise of a renewal of the revolutionary repertory, was
not only October 1917 but also the idea of humanizing October, of
making it easier to live with. It will be objected that Gorbachev is still
working at that, or so he says, but he himself is obliged to brandish
slogans which negate the principles of October: the rule of law, "formal"
constitutionalism, the separation of powers, not to speak of the market
economy.
But doesn't all this amount
to
an homage to the French Revolu–
tion after all - in which at least the noncommunist left in France could
take some comfort? Alas, even this consolation seems dubious. The
French Revolution has been so thoroughly appropriated by the bolshe–
viks - constantly brandished as if they had some sort of lien on it - that
no one in Prague, Budapest, or Warsaw laid claim to the heritage last
autumn. Instead, and this was practically unheard-of in Continental Eu–
rope, the American Revolution, Madison and Jefferson were being cited
in preference to Mirabeau and Robespierre. For my own part, I was
surprised - in the course of a discussion with a leader of the interregional
opposition party in the Soviet parliament (the left wing of Gorbachev,
to the extent that the term retains some meaning) - to observe that his
constitutional references were invariably to institutions of the United
States. Thus has Jacobinism played its final trick on the French Revolu–
tion, by depriving it of its position as the ancestor of Europe's most re–
cent rendezvous with freedom.
We must conclude therefore that the collapse of the communist
idea affects the European left as such and not just the Communist parties.
By dint of rediscovering the complementary and contradictory terms of
the liberal equation, civil rights and the free market, as if they were new
ideas, the European left casts doubt on what for two centuries has been
the mainspring of revolutionary messianism: the notion that progress
moves in a certain direction (for if capitalism follows upon communism,
what becomes of history?) and at the same time, the hope of replacing
capitalism with a society of producers freed from the commercial econ–
omy. It is thus not only Marxist revisionism, a favorite exercise of our
intellectuals, that is deprived of its basis; it has become all but impossible
to envisage a third way, a society that would escape the curse of both
capitalism and communism.
Obviously, there exists a convenient escape from this dilemma, and
that is to say that if the communist idea is dying, liberalism is hardly in
much better shape, since no contemporary society will ever completely
entrust its future
to
the hazards of the market. But no one is fooled by
this false window. Liberalism has never been a formula for the operation
of modern economies; it is a philosophy of man which existed long be-
