If you’re over the age of 50 you might remember a bestselling novel and later a popular film entitled Is Paris Burning? that boasted a fantastic cast of French and American actors, including Jean-Paul Belmondo, Kirk Douglas, Simone Signoret, Orson Wells, and Alain Delon. The novel and the film both describe the resistance to the Nazis near the end of World War II, perhaps the last real heroic moment in French history.
Today, France isn’t occupied — unless you count multinational corporations as occupiers. Moreover, today there’s little overt resistance to repression, conformity and consumerism. If the Nazis were the obvious enemies of France during World War II, the enemies of the French tradition of liberty, equality and fraternity today are the citizens of France themselves. They’re racists and Anti-Semites and they’re bolder now than they have been in a long time.
They’re also members of the National Front, the right-wing party, who have called Christiane Taubara, France’s black minister of justice, “a monkey” and who have waved bananas in public to express their views.
For a long time Taubara unfortunately said nothing. More recently she observed, “Our society is disintegrating.” Another sign of the social disintegration is the shooting that took place at the office of Liberation, the newspaper founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir 40 years ago in 1973, and that left a young photographer seriously wounded.
As I write this from a café in the French countryside the shooter is still at large, hunted by the police. (Please don’t get nostalgic. The café is located in a huge, immaculate mall much like a mall one would find in any American city.) In an article entitled “Liberation Under Fire,” Annette Levy-Willard has described the events at the newspaper and the manhunt in Paris as a “bad movie.” She also observed that, “a strange, febrile atmosphere has indeed fallen over France.”
On this occasion, I have only been in France for a week but it does not seem helpful to describe the events as a “bad movie” or to suggest that a “fever” as fallen over France. If one knows French history, the events are not so strange. What’s happening in France isn’t a bad movie, and the fever hasn’t fallen of its own accord. The French themselves have dangerously heated up the political and cultural atmosphere. If they themselves don’t do something to defuse the situation Paris may go up in flames again.
It’s the racists, the Anti-Semites and the members of the National Front who are fanning the flames of popular discontent. Nearly 70 years ago, the French defeated fascism. Now they find themselves with a homegrown variety of right-wing politics that has echoes of German fascism. The so-called “socialist” government of Francois Hollande hasn’t done much to help the situation. There’s little if anything that’s socialist about monsieur Hollande or his government.
What France needs today is the kind of verve that Sartre and de Beauvoir showed when they founded Liberation. The country also needs the boldness of the Communists who led the Resistance against the Nazis during World War II and who found allies among genuine socialists. The newspaper, Liberation, could also play a vital role if it would rally the French nation, expose racism and Anti-Semitism, and enable the society as a whole to come to an understanding of the deep economic causes of the current unrest.
If France drifts further toward the right, it will be a tragedy not only for the French, but for humanity itself. Silence from anti-racists is the last thing that France needs now.
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