Par Simon Leys
The Australian Literary Review, 1 August 2007

G K. CHESTERTON, whose formidable mind drew inspiration from a vast culture – literary, political, poetical, historical and philosophical – once received the naive praise of a lady: “Oh, Mr Chesterton, you know so many things!” He suavely replied: “Madam, I know nothing: I am a journalist.”

The many enemies of French philosopher Jean-François Revel (1924-2006) often attempted to dismiss him as a mere journalist which, of course, he was among many other things, and very much in the Chestertonian fashion.

At first he may seem odd to associate these two names: what could there be in common between the great Christian apologist and the staunch atheist, between the mystical poet and the strict rationalist, between the huge, benevolent man mountain and the short, fiery, nimble and pugnacious intellectual athlete (and, should we also add, between the devoted husband and the irrepressible ladies’ man)? One could multiply the contrasts, yet, on a deeper level, the essence of their genius was very much alike.

Revel was an extrovert who took daily delight in the company of his friends:

I am the most sociable creature; other people’s society is my joy. Though, for me, a happy day should have a part of solitude, it must also afford a few hours of the most intense of all the pleasures of the mind: conversation. Friendship has always occupied a central place in my life, as well as the keen desire to make new acquaintances, to hear them, to question them, to test their reactions to my own views.

Always sparring with his interlocutors, he was passionately commited to is ideas, but if he took his own beliefs with utter seriousness, he did not take his own person seriously. Again, one could apply to him what Chesterton’s brother said of his famous sibling: “He had a passionate need to express his opinions, but he would express them as readily and well to a man he met on a bus.”
Revel’s capacity for self-irony is the crowning grace of his memoirs, The Thief in an Empty House. Personal records can be a dangerous exercice, but in his case it eventuated in a triumphant masterpiece.

His humour enchanted his readers, but kept disconcerting the more pompous pundits. The French greatly value wit, which they display in profusion, but humour often makes them uneasy, especially when it is applied to important subjects; they do not have a word for it, they do not know the thing.

Whereas wit is a form of duelling – it aims to wound or to kill – the essence of humour is self-deprecatory. Once again, a Chestertonian saying could be apposite: “My critics think that I am not serious, but only funny, because they think that ‘funny’ is the opposite of ’serious’. But ‘funny’ is the opposite of ‘not funny’ and nothing else. Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or in short jokes is analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or German.”

What compounded the dismay of Revel’s pretentious critics was his implacable clarity. One of his close friends and collaborators said he doubted if Revel, in his entire career, had written a single sentence that was obscure. In the Parisian intellectual world such a habit can easily ruin a writer’s credit, for simple souls and solemn mediocrities are impressed only by what is couched in opaque jargon. And, in their eyes, how could one possibly say something important if one is not self-important?

With the accuracy of his information and the sharpness of his irony, Revel deflated the huge balloons of cant that elevate the chattering classes. They felt utterly threatened, for he was exposing the puffery of the latest intellectual fashions upon which their livehood depended. At times they could not hide their panic; for instance, the great guru of the intelligentsia, Jacques Lacan, during one of his psychoanalytical seminars at the Sorbonne, performed in front of his devotees a voodoo-like exorcism.
He frantically trampled underfoot and destroyed a copy of Revel’s book Why Philosophers?, in which Lacan’s charlatanism was analysed.

Yet such outbursts weere mere circus acts; far more vicious was the invisible conspiracy that surrounded Revel with a wall of silence, well documented in Pierre Boncenne’s Pour Jean-François Revel: Un esprit libre (Plon, Paris, 2006), a timely and perceptive book that takes the full measure of Revel’s intellectual, literary and human stature.

A paradoxical situation developed: Revel’s weekly newspaper columns were avidly read, nearly every one of his 30-odd books was an instant bestseller, and yet the most influential “progressive” critics studiously ignored his existence. His books were not reviewed, his ideas were not discussed, if his name was mentioned at all it was with a patronising sneer, if not downright slander.

Revel was quintessentially French in his literary tastes and sensitivity (his pages on Michel de Montaigne, Francois Rabelais and Marcel Proust marry intelligence with love; his anthology of French poetry mirrors his original appreciation of the poetic language), in his art of living (his great book on gastronomy is truly a “feast in words”) and in his conviviality (he truly cared for his friends).

And yet what strikingly set him apart from most other intellectuals of his generation was his genuinely cosmopolitan outlook.

He had spent abroad the best part of his formative and early creative years, mostly in Mexico and Italy. In addition to English (spoken by few educated Fench of his time) he was fluent in Italian, Spanish and German; until the end of his life he retained the healthy habit to start every day (he rose at 5am) by listening to he BBC news and reading six foreign newspapers.

On international affairs, on literature, art and ideas, he had universal perspectives that broke completely from the suffocating provincialism of the contemporary Parisian elites. In the 18th century, French was the common language of the leading minds of continental Europe; 20th-century French intellectuals hardly noticed that times had changed in this respect; they retained the dangerous belief that whatever was not expressed in French could hardly matter.

Revel never had enough sarcasm to denounce this sort of self-indulgence; on the bogus notion of le rayonnement français, he was scathing: “French culture has radiated for so long, it’s a wonder mankind has not died from sunstroke.” He fiercely fought against chauvinist cultural blindness, and especially against its most cretinous expression: irrational anti-Americanism. At the root of this attitude he detected a subconscious resentment: the french feel that when Americans are playing a leading role in the political-cultural world they are usurping what is by birthright a French prerogative.

By vocation and academic training Revel was originally a philosopher (he entered at an exceptionally early age the Ecole Normale Superieure, the apex of the French higher education system). He taught philosophy and eventually wrote a history of Western philosophy (eschewing all technical jargon, it is a model of lucid synthesis).

However, he became disenchanted with the contemporary philosophers who, he flet, had betrayed their calling by turning philosophy into a professional career and a mere literary genre. “Philosophy,” he wrote “ought to return to its original and fundamental question: How should I live?” he preferred simply to call himslef “a man of letters”.

Ancient Greek poet Archilochus famously said: “The fow knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Revel was the archetypical fox, but at the same time he held with all the determination of a hedgehog to one central idea that inspires, pervades and motivates all his endeavours:

The belief that each individual destiny, as well as the destiny of mankind, depends upon the accuracy – or the falsity – of the information at their disposal, and upon the way in which they put this information to use.

He devoted one of his books specifically to this issue, La Connaissance Inutile (Useless Knowledge), but this theme runs through nearly all his writings.

Politics naturally absorbed a great amount of his attention. From the outset he showed his willingness to commit himself personaly, and at great risk: as a young man in occupied France he joined the Resistance against the Nazis. After the war, his basic political allegiance was, and always remainded, to the Left and the principles of liberal democracy. He was sharply critical of Charles de Gaulle and of all saviours and providential leaders in military uniforms.

Yet, like George Orwell before him, he always believed that only an uncompromising denunciation of all forms of Stalinist totalitarianism can ensure the ultimate victory of socialism. Thus – again, like Orwell – he earned for himself the hostility of his starry-eyed comrades.

Revel’s attempt at entering into active politics was short-lived, but the experience gave him an invaluable insight into the essential intellectual dishonesty that is unavoidably attached to partisan politicking. He was briefly a Socialist Party candidate at the 1967 national elections, which put him in close contact with François Mitterrand (then leader of the Opposition). The portrait he paints of Mitterrand in his memoirs is hilarious and horrifying.

Mitterrand was the purest type of political animal: he had no politics at all. He had a brilliant intelligence, but for him ideas were neither right or wrong, they were only useful or useless in the pursuit of power. The object of power was not a possibility to enact certain policies; the object of all policies was simply attain and retain power.

Revel, having drafted a speech for his own electoral campaign, was invited by Mitterrand to read it to him. The speech started, “Although I cannot deny some of my opponent’s achievements…” Mitterand interrupted him at once, screaming: “No! Never, never! In politics never acknowledge that your opponent has any merit. This is the basic rule of the game.”

Revel understood once and for all that this game was not for him and it was the end of his political ambition. Which proved to be a blessing: had politics swallowed him at that early stage in his life how much poorer the world of ideas and letters would have been. (And one could have said exactly the same about his close friend Mario Vargas Llosa, who – luckily for literature – was defeated in presidential elections in Peru.)

Dead writers who were also friends never leave us: whenever we open their books, we hear again their very personal voices and our old exchanges are suddenly revived. I had many conversations (and discussions: different opinions are the memorable spices of friendship) with Revel; yet what I wish to record here is not something he said, but a silence that had slightly puzzled me at the time. The matter is trifling and frivolous (for which I apologise), but what touches me is that I found the answer many years later, in his writings.

A long time ago, as we were walking along a street in Paris, chatting as we went, he asked me about a film I had seen the night before, Federico Fellini’s Casanova (which he had not seen). I told him that one scene had impressed me, by its acute psychological insight into the truth that love-making without love is but a very grim sort of gymnastics. He stopped abruptly and gave me a long quizzical look, as if he was trying to find out whether I really believed that, or was merely pulling his leg.
Unable to decide, he said, “Hmmm” and we resumed our walk, chatting of other things.

Many years later, reading his autobiography, I suddenly understood. When he was a precocious adolescent of 15, at school in Marseilles, he was quite brilliant in all humanities subjects but hopeless in mathematics. Every Thursday, pretending to his mother that he was receiving extra tuition in maths, he used to go to a little brothel. He would first do his school work in the common lounge and, after that, go upstairs with one of the girls. The madam granted him a “beginner’s rebate”, and the tuition fee generously advanced by his mother covered the rest.

One Thursday, however, as he was walking up the stairs his maths teacher came down. The young man froze, but the teacher passed impassively, merely muttering between clenched teeth: “You will always get passing marks in maths.” The schoolboy kept their secret and the teacher honoured his part of the bargain; Revel’s mother was delighted by the sudden improvement in his school results.

I belatedly realised that, from a rather early age, Revel had acquired a fairly different perspective on the subject of our chat.

At the time of Revel’s death in April last year, Vargas Llosa concluded the eloquent and deeply felt obituary he wrote for our friend in Spanish newspaper El pais: “Jean-François Revel, we are going to miss you so much.” How true.

Simon Leys

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Books reviewed:

- Régis Debray, L’Emprise, Gallimard, 146p, FF75, ISBN 2-07-075861-3
- Régis Debray, I.F. suite et fin, Gallimard, 190p, FF85, ISBN 2-07-076069-3
- Tzvetan Todorov, Mémoire du mal, Tentation du bien, Enquête sur le siècle, Robert Laffont, 356p, FF149, ISBN 2-221-09079-9
- Jean-François Revel, Les Plats de saison, Seuil, 442p., FF135, ISBN 2-02-037137-5

Non-French people can be forgiven for wondering how the French intellectual sees the world these days. He was last seen planning the overthrow of the bourgeoisie in a Paris café in 1972, and apart from gnomic utterances about post-modern society little has been heard from him since then. What happened was that by the 1980s the French intellectual had lost his trademark faith in Marxism and become a believer in democracy, civil liberties, the rights of minorities, and relief for the wretched of the earth. In short he was just like other western intellectuals; he had ceased to be an object of study or curiosity. In many ways this was good news. Humanitarianism is a nice sort of doctrine; you can’t get things spectacularly wrong by preaching it. Surely it is better for young idealists to dream of building clinics in Africa than blowing up their parents’ home. So have French intellectuals put their support for collectivist monstrosities behind them? Has the rise of humanitarianism led to a new age of responsibility and maturity in France’s public debate? The authors of the books under review beg to differ.

Régis Debray, a 1960s radical turned champion of the nation-state, formally broke with humanitarianism during the Kosovo conflict. He made himself thoroughly unpopular by travelling to Serbia, dodging the bombs, and writing on his return that the NATO campaign was doing more harm than good. The humanitarian Left rounded on Debray, lambasting him as naïve at best and a closet supporter of Milosevic at worst. The debate raged briefly in Le Monde in May 1999, and ended with Debray’s discomfiture. France’s smart opinion, like the public at large, applauded the bombing of Yugoslavia.

After a spell away from public view, Debray responded by publishing two short books. His aim was not to revive old disputes over Kosovo, but to expose what he viewed as the biases of his critics. The first book, L’Emprise takes on journalists. This is not a new departure for Debray, who has elevated the art of deconstructing newspeak into a new academic discipline, “médiologie”. L’Emprise (”The Hold”) compares the French press of today to the Roman Catholic church of old. The new religion, Debray contends, has its articles of faith (human rights), its charitable orders (French doctors and the like), and its crusading knights (NATO). The role of the media, as the new clergy, is to uphold the faith and keep people to the straight and narrow. “Major excommunication used to be fulminated ex cathedra by bishops in dark churches,” Debray writes. Now dissenters like himself are confronted by new inquisitors: “Heavyweight commentators (…) , foes of totalitarianism entrenched in all the weeklies, channels, and dailies without exception.”

The second book, I.F. suite et fin, takes on intellectuals. Again, Debray is on familiar territory: in 1979 he published a broadside against Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: the Intellectuals of Modern France (Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France) His latest book contends that the intellectuel français, the “I.F.” of the title, is a pale imitation of the 1900 model (the noun “intellectual” originated during the Dreyfus affair). Émile Zola was an international celebrity, unlike his parochial heirs. The original “I.F.” was an advocate for unpopular causes; today’s is a prosecutor bent on bringing evil-doers to book. Above all, he is a moralist: his mind is programmed to tell Right from Wrong, rather than truth from error. As Debray remarks, the opposite was true of Dreyfus’s defenders. The question they asked was: “Is he guilty or innocent?”, and not: “Is it better to be for or against the accused captain?” Debray argues that because French intellectuals are more interested in moral correctness than in factual accuracy, they are condemned to irrelevance. The “I.F.”, he says, is on the verge of extinction.

Debray’s main merit is that he does not go for easy targets. Human rights groups and relief agencies are so obviously well meaning that we readily take them at their own estimation of selfless keepers of the public interest. But as Debray reminds us, good people are vulnerable to self-righteousness: their very goodness leads them to regard opponents as morally tainted, rather than intellectually wrong, and public debate is stifled as a result. Ultimately self-righteousness does not work: there may be excellent arguments for cancelling Third World debt or ending child labour, just as there might have been good reasons to bomb Serbia — a point Debray concedes. But only through reasoned discussion can a point of view lastingly prevail.

But to hit hard target you need to focus your sights. Debray does not, and wastes much ammunition as a result. He is reluctant to quote, or even name, his opponents, and prefers to inveigh against the intellectual media-hounds in general. Debray’s bugbears seem to be Bernard-Henri Lévy and André Glucksmann, but one gets the impression that he cannot bring himself to confront them head on. Unfortunately for Debray, a biting irony and a zest for metaphorical pyrotechnics are no substitutes for clarity and attention to detail.

When he does give specifics, he is sloppy with his examples. While making a point about the tendency of those who support armed intervention to exaggerate atrocities, Debray dismissively mentions estimates of 100,000 dead in Kosovo and one million in Rwanda, suggesting that both figures were plucked out of the air to stir up international outrage. This may have been true regarding Kosovo: in the end, the number of ethnic Albanian pronounced dead or missing after the war was just over 6,300 — a terrible crime, but hardly a case of genocide. In the case of Rwanda the one-million figure is close to the truth, the word “genocide” was justified and the rest of the world let it happen. One can argue that the international community disgraced itself in both Kosovo and Rwanda, but not in the same way.

Even in his basic contentions, Debray gets carried away. He offers no evidence that French intellectuals are a dying breed. And has their quality really declined in recent decades? It’s all a matter of taste, of course, but few in France lament the passing of Marxoid structuralism as a model for social sciences (although the old deconstructionist flame is being kept alive in American universities). No French intellectual today would affirm a duty to lie for a good cause, as Sartre did, or sing the praises of Iran’s Ayatollahs, as Foucault did, and that must be an improvement. Of course, the fact that intellectuals have embraced human rights, arguably a worthier cause than the class struggle, does not entitle them to feel smug. Anyone claiming superior wisdom in the name of modernity is bound to be judged harshly by future generations. Ideologies may change, but basic attitudes remain: the combination of naïveté and arrogance that has characterised France’s intellectual life for centuries shows no sign of disappearing. That charge is damning enough. Debray would have made his job easier by concentrating on documenting it, rather than stating a dubious law of intellectual decline.

Tzvetan Todorov in Mémoire du Mal, Tentation du Bien offers much more thorough and effective critique of political Manicheism than Debray does. A Bulgarian-born linguist and guru of 1970s structuralism, Todorov turned to the history of ideas late in his career. His latest book is an intellectual survey of the Twentieth century that draws many of its illustrations from his country of adoption, France. Todorov argues that the most fateful innovation of the past hundred years — the “mal du siècle”, as he puts it — has been the introduction of moralism into the heart of politics. As morality ceased to place strict demands on private conduct, public life became shot through with it.

The transformation of politics into a struggle between good and evil was carried out to its deadliest extremes by totalitarian regimes. What characterised Nazism or Communism was the mass murder of large sections of the population for the good of mankind. Tororov makes clear that both variants of totalitarianism can, and should, be understood rationally, a point controversially made about the Nazis by the German historian Ernst Nolte in his 1986 book The European Civil War (whose French translation last year triggered a local version of Germany’s “historians’ debate” of the 1980s). The word “rational”, as used by both Todorov and Nolte, is not meant as justification, but suggests that both systems have their internal logic. Stalin or Hitler did not kill millions out of sheer bloodlust. Kulaks had to be exterminated because private property was the root of all evil; for the Nazis, a healthy nation had to be rid of Jews and other parasites. “The Chekist or SS who kills ‘enemies’,” Todorov writes, “believes he is working for the benefit of others and acting rationally.”

This idea is hardly new — “Who does not view his own cause as just?” Erasmus asked — but it seems to have been neglected in the twentieth century. The Nazis and their racist ideology are justly condemned as evil; but many westerners find it difficult to judge communists as harshly because their ideals of peace and brotherhood are generous. Todorov is not for a moment suggesting that we should judge regimes either on their own terms or not at all. Some are clearly wicked, he says, but we must not pass judgment on the basis of self-proclaimed intentions. Almost by definition, these are admirable. What makes distinguishes good from evil systems is the means they are ready to use to reach their ideals.

Todorov’s central point is that totalitarian regimes do not have a monopoly on oppressive self-righteousness. “Totalitarianism may sometimes be seen, with justification, as the evil empire,” he writes, “but it does not follow that democracy embodies, in all places and at all times, the kingdom of virtue.” Like Debray, Todorov considers the war over Kosovo as a raw affirmation of western power: NATO was spoiling for a fight with an enemy conveniently cast as a new Hitler. One does not need to agree with him on this to accept his wider point: by presenting the war as a combat against pure evil waged on behalf of pure victims, the allies justified a ruthless use of their firepower.

Similarly, one does not need to share Todorov’s dim view of the United Nations International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia as a poodle of the Security Council to express concern about the Tribunal’s independence. The indictment of Slobodan Milosevic on charges of crimes against humanity at the height of the Kosovo conflict is disturbing: one may support NATO and the Tribunal, but any suggestion that they may be working hand in hand undermines the authority of both. The most worrying thing in all this is the position of those who, in France and elsewhere, traditionally stand for impartial justice. The press, human rights advocates, and intellectuals are squarely behind the Chief Prosecutor in The Hague and assume that defendants are guilty. The prevailing attitude among them seems to be: “We are the good guys, so we cannot be suspected of abuse of power.”

If current conflicts can be staged as morality plays, so can past ones. Slaying the beast once the danger has passed is a safe way of being right, and one that is particularly prevalent in France. Todorov notes that the French are obsessed by the German occupation: they go over the same ground, not to analyse events dispassionately but to pass judgement. In the late 1980s and 1990s a proclaimed devoir de mémoire (”duty to remember”) was exercised through the trials of dying men called upon to answer for the crimes of the Gestapo and the Vichy regime. As Todorov observes, trials are based on the clash of sharply opposing points of view, and are therefore not the best way to shed light on a complex past. Anyone wishing to have an idea of the moral maze experienced by collaborationists and resistance fighters will learn more from reading, say, the novels of Patrick Modiano than the transcripts of any trial.

Mémoire du Mal, Tentation du Bien contains a number of short essays on writers, such as Primo Levi and Vasily Grossman, who rejected moral posturing despite their first-hand experience of the century’s worst systems. What is striking in Todorov’s selection is how obscure the French authors are: who, in France or elsewhere, remembers David Rousset or Germaine Tillon? Even in their time these Nazi camp survivors who became critics of the totalitarian system that survived the war had no intellectual influence. Despite Todorov’s best efforts, they will remain footnotes in what Bernard-Henri Lévy has called “le Siècle de Sartre”. Culturally, France is stuck in the darkest twentieth century.

This is also the conclusion reached by Jean-François Revel in Les Plats de Saison. This book is not a full-blown political essay, but a diary for the year 2000 where Revel, a philosopher, and best-selling political writer, jots down his daily gripes and reflections on everything from tasteless radishes to France’s awkward constitution. Anyone who enjoys Revel’s acerbic style and lucid thought will feast on such a diverse menu (the title, meaning “seasonal dishes”, reflects both this variety and the author’s gastronomic interests).

Despite the necessarily broken structure of the book, bit-by-bit Revel paints a vivid picture of France’s intellectual landscape. In his previous book, La Grande parade, he had shown how, perversely, the death of the Soviet Union had led to a revival of anti-capitalism in the West. It was now possible to dream of an alternative to economic liberalism without being made to face the fact of life under “real socialism”. As capitalism became universally practised it was increasingly reviled. But while in most western countries this condemnation merely brought together vocal minorities — the hard Left, the far Right, and trade unions– in France it is the majority view.

Les Plats de saison provides many weird and wonderful illustrations of this. At a leaving party thrown last year for the outgoing Employment Minister, Martine Aubry, her staff broke into the Internationale, the original Soviet anthem – a song, Revel notes, that is as relevant to modern France as Maréchal, nous voilà, the hymn to the leader of Vichy France, Marshall Pétain. This incident is more than a drunken outburst by pseudo-revolutionaries: it is indicative of a deep hostility to market forces shared by French people of all persuasions. President Chirac, a conservative, said last year that globalisation was a cause of world poverty. Prime Minister Jospin, a socialist, has been fighting a rearguard battle with his European counterparts against the Blairite Third Way.

The most popular public figure in France last year was undoubtedly José Bové, peasant leader, globaphobe extraordinaire, and enemy of junk food. The nation was shocked when a court gave him a light prison sentence for trashing a McDonald’s restaurant. Union leaders and politicians rushed to condemn the verdict, explaining that farmers, truck-drivers and other groups often express their grievances through “direct action” without getting punished for it — so why should Bové? As Revel observes, those leaders make no distinction between legal and illegal protest: destroying property and blocking roads are regarded as legitimate forms of political action in France. Violent protest can even be encouraged: when anti-capitalists in December demanded free train rides to Nice, where they were planning to disrupt a European summit, the Transport Minister met them half-way and offered a 50% reduction. “It’s the Revolution subsidised by those against whom it is directed,” Revel comments.

Intellectuals on the whole reflect rather than combat popular feelings against to “ultra-liberalism”, as faith in markets is known in France. This is partly because in the twentieth century, the intellectual has defined himself as an opponent to the “system”, and nowadays the only system to oppose is a capitalist one. To be sure, there is no shortage of books analysing the ills of France’s bloated and unrestructured public sector or making the case for globalisation — but they are mostly written by sociologists and economists who have no meaningful impact. The intellectuals who matter, the talk-show commentators and leader writers, expand on the ravages of global capitalism as if no-one had ever make a serious case for free trade. As a result public discussion is divorced from facts and knowledge available to any first-year economics student.

Revel concludes that democratic capitalism may have triumphed over communist totalitarianism in the real world –something to be thankful for — but not in the minds of many people, and not in the minds of the French people. The idea that totalitarianism is not just a system of government but also a mindset that can flourish under a democracy has underpinned Revel’s whole work. Mental habits inherited from totalitarianism can therefore survive its destruction as a geo-political entity. “The victory of democracy will not be complete as long as lying continues to appear natural in the world of politics as in that of thought,” he writes. “As long as betraying truth, denying elementary facts (…) and attempting to destroy rather that refute those who contradict you continue to prevail in public debate, we cannot claim, whatever the calendar says, that we have left the twentieth century and entered the third millennium.”

Henri Astier

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Books reviewed:

- Bernard Lacroix, Jacques Lagroye, eds, Le président de la République, usages et genèses d’une institution, Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 416p., 180F, ISBN 2 7246-0613-2.

- Jean-François Revel, L’Absolutisme inefficace, ou contre le présidentialisme à la française, Paris: Plon, 190p., 95F, ISBN 2-259-02478-5.

If, as the philosopher Alain wrote, “power deeply transforms those who wield it”, it is no wonder François Mitterrand seems to have changed so much in his dozen years as France’s president. The socialist who in the 1960s denounced de Gaulle’s “permanent coup d’État”, and whose 1981 victory over a king-like Giscard was hailed as a repeat of Bastille Day, has, according to critics, turned into an absolute monarch himself. His image now tarnished by a spate of scandals, Mitterrand is as unpopular as any French Head of State since Louis XVI. As the right is expected to win the legislative elections in March, which means that a conservative prime minister will be in for another bout of “cohabitation” with a hostile chief executive, no serious political discussion in France is complete without a debate on the president’s powers.

The two books under review cover the main points at issue. They agree on the symptoms (presidential hypertrophy) but disagree on the nature of the disease and on the implied cure. Le président de la République, usages et genèses d’une institution, a collection of essays by various constitutional experts, argues that the presidency was not shaped once for all in 1958 but over time by the political actors of the day. The institution, one of the editors writes, “should not be seen as a reality which exists independently from those who hold it”.

True, the 1958 constitution was designed to put an end to the “régime des partis” — the parliamentary root of all political evils according to de Gaulle. A strong president nominates the prime minister and has the power to dissolve the Assembly. The presidency, however, did not fully eclipse Parliament until the 1960s, with the direct election of the president and the repeated use of referendums.

The taming of the prime minister illustrates this evolution. The constitution gives the “Chef du gouvernement”, whose authority rests on Parliament, a central role in the executive. It does not give the president the right to dismiss him/her at will. But de Gaulle and Pompidou demanded undated resignation letters before nominating their prime ministers. Today, there is so little doubt about the president’s right to sack them (except during cohabitation), that no such stratagems are needed.

Public-speaking is a key aspect of the modern French presidency. Presidents are under no obligation to explain their policies: they choose the time, the place, and the format of their addresses; when they wish to be interviewed they handpick the journalists. Thanks to this complete control over communication, they have developed a tendency to speak in bombastic generalities and sidestep hard questions.

The contributor, however, does not address the substance of presidential pronouncements. It would be interesting to study, say, ritual references to the world’s freedom-lovers turning their gazes towards Paris, waiting for a ray of hope to shine. Their anxious expectation is usually rewarded after the advent of a new president: “Le monde enfin désire… nous voir jouer un rôle qui nous revient, parce qu’il sent que sera à l’avantage de tous les hommes” (De Gaulle, 13 June 1958); “Des centaines de millions d’hommes sur la terre sauront ce soir que la France est prête à leur parler le langage qu’ils ont appris à aimer d’elle” (Mitterrand, 11 May 1981), etc.

One contributor helpfully uses Weber’s notion of charisma — the leader’s access to “essential truths that are inaccessible to common men.” While charisma is initially an individual quality, it can become the attribute of an institution. Since Pompidou succeeded de Gaulle in 1969, whoever was president has dealt with eternal verities while ordinary politicians have been mired in the world of day-to-day contingencies. This “routinization of charisma” has enabled the Elys‚e to take on new powers: de Gaulle’s once controversial “domaine r‚serv‚” doctrine (foreign policy as a presidential preserve) is now widely accepted.

But despite many sharp analyses, the book doesn’t convince. Forget about the often atrocious jargon — the writers are after all legal scholars. The central emphasis on an ever-evolving practice suggests that the written constitution doesn’t matter — a peculiar idea for a Roman law country. And to argue, as a one expert does, that “law is fact that has imposed itself” simply means that France has no constitution, customary or otherwise.

Far more convincing is Jean-François Revel’s idea that French “présidentocratie” was “written in the genetic code” of the Fifth Republic. In L’Absolutisme inefficace, an enormously entertaining book which should be required reading for anyone interested in French politics, Revel argues that the main flaw is not in men but in the system. “The misuse of some tools derives so obviously from the instruction manual that it is criminal to put them into the hands of even a saint.”

Revel starts with the fact that the 1958 constitution sets no meaningful check to presidential powers. The main control — an election every seven years — comes too rarely to be effective. With the president free to dissolve an Assembly which cannot vote him out, Parliament was bound to turn into the rubber-stamp body it has become. The judiciary, kept on a short leash since the Revolution, has never been under tighter political control. The president heads and nominates all nine members of the council that promotes judges. “In the logic of the régime”, Revel writes, “the great interests of the nation are only discussed at the Elysée palace among a narrow circle of unelected advisers and ultimately within the presidential brain itself.”

Nothing is more alien to the Fifth Republic than Montesquieu’s theory of checks and balances. Separation of powers was explicitly rejected by de Gaulle in a famous 1964 press conference: “the indivisible authority of the State is wholly conferred on the president by the people. All others, whether ministerial, civilian, military or judicial, are delegated and maintained by him.”

According to Revel the result of this imbalance is not action, but paralysis. Like any omnipotent institution, the French presidency “does not work and prevents everything else from working”. Given the lack of public debate, the main way for people to make their displeasure felt is to take to the street. This invariably leads the government to cave in to special interests. Last summer’s disastrous showdown with lorry drivers is only the latest illustration of France’s ineffective absolutism.

The other main feature of the 1958 constitution is the two-headed executive. The Head of State is flanked by a prime minister whose authority nominally derives from Parliament but who predictably became the president’s creature. This was obvious in 1972, when president Pompidou sacked Chaban-Delmas, who had just won a massive vote of confidence in the Assembly. Chirac’s resignation in 1976 illustrates the same point: when French prime ministers leave before their terms run out, this is not due, as in Britain, to a disagreement with their Parliamentary base, but to a clash with the president.

Not only does the president pick the prime minister, but also the cabinet. Pierre Mauroy, Mitterrand’s first prime minister, complained that he had chosen only one member of his government. But this does not make France’s executive similar to America’s. The White House, of course, must deal with a powerful Congress and judicial busybodies. More importantly, the US president — like the British PM — is clearly accountable for his actions, while in France the fiction of an independent government shields the president in times of trouble. The division of labour in the French executive is simple: the president takes the decisions and the prime minister takes the blame.

Immunity from scandal is a striking fact of French political life in the past decade. Revel points out that Mitterrand never had to answer for illegal arm-sales to Iran (”Luchaire”), the embezzlement of foreign aid by cabinet officials (”Carrefour du d‚veloppement”), attempts to block a corruption inquiry (”Urba”), or for the use of blood known to be AIDS-contaminated, leading to the infection of more than a thousand haemophiliacs.

Revel notes that immunity extends downwards to a crowd of minions who owe their careers to the protection of an unimpeachable president. Scandals that elsewhere would have triggered top-level investigations resulted in the prosecution of mere underlings, and at worst in the resignation of a minister (after the bombing of a Greenpeace ship in 1985). “In France”, concludes Revel, “the person responsible is not the one who gives orders, but the one who receives them.”

Not only is French presidentialism troublesome but it spreads its trouble wide. Across the political spectrum, men waste their talents pursuing the only job that matters. Paralysis extends to the whole body politic as the potential candidate “joins others in a special waiting room, a VIP lounge, where one had better tend to one’s image rather than public affairs, while of course pretending not to care about the former and think only of the latter”. Again and agains, Revel traces France’s problems — fear of reform, lack of discussion, waste of public funds, nepotism, mob rule, corruption, etc. — to a presidential institution which combines omnipotence and inaction.

There is more to the debate on the presidency than an argument about the impact of the 1958 constitution. Those who say that the system changes as the balance of political power shifts will stress that the Assembly recovers its prerogatives in times of “cohabitation”, when the cabinet’s parliamentary basis is made obvious. The constitution clearly works, and the government should take this opportunity to chip away at the presidency. France has known too many constitutional upheavals: it now needs small reforms, like the shortening of the presidential term.

The others will deny that cohabitation works. “It is silly to think that a country can be governed by two mutually hostile leaders”, Revel writes. He points out that the 1986-88 period, when the president was both in power and in the opposition, only paved the way for Mitterrand’s re-election. Tinkering with the system will achieve little, Revel argues, as long as no choice is made between US-style presidentialism and British-style parliamentarianism. In either case, there must be limits to what the executive can do and accountability for what it has done.

What are the chances of reform? Some see the very seriousness of the situation as an encouraging sign. As Revel is fond of saying (quoting Proust): “the disease is the best doctor — it forces the patient to cure himself.”

Henri Astier

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Half-a-dozen essays written in the 1970s and 1980s established Jean-François Revel, a philosopher/journalist with a zest for anti-Gaullist pamphleteering, as France’s leading anti-communist intellectual. In best-sellers with dire titles like The Totalitarian Temptation or How Democracies Perish, Revel noted that capitalist democracy, which carried with it an unprecedented degree of wealth and freedom, was widely seen as repressive, while communism, a demonstrably failed system, was considered even by Westerners as progressive. He concluded that the West was hopeless at exploiting its own strengths, and often more bent on rushing to its enemy’s rescue than on self-preservation. In the end, he speculated, the law of political evolution might be the survival of the least fit. Now that the Soviet empire has collapsed and capitalism is acclaimed from Managua to Ulan Bator, Revel’s ideas look even more unfashionable and irrelevant than they did a decade ago. In Le Regain Démocratique, he proves that they are as thought-provoking as ever.

The first half of the book deals with the end of the “cold war”. Revel stresses that he never argued democracies were doomed — there is a big difference between warning and predicting. In his previous books he merely described what might happen if democracies kept looking the other way while the Soviets pursued aggressive policies. As it happened, the Soviet ran out of ammunition. The victory of the West, Revel says, had little to do with a principled determination to stand up for its own interest and ideals.

Indeed, he points out that between 1985 and 90, democracies were at their appeasing best. In June 1990, for example, as the Soviet Union was about to collapse and the West had never looked so strong, Mikhail Gorbachev negotiated in Washington from a position of strength to obtain financial and political support from Westerners, who ignored the desperate appeals of independence-seeking Balts. The prevailing idea at the time was: “We must help Gorbachev in order to encourage reform.” The lessons of détente — that to reform communism you must start by ditching it and that aid only delays the process — had not been learnt. The West, Revel concludes, “never believed in its own superiority” and “was rescued almost against its will, not because it defended itself but because the forces which sought to destroy it unexpectedly disintegrated.”

Revel gives three reasons for this disintegration. First, from 1980 to 1985 democracies did show a rare readiness to support attempts to reverse Soviet conquests (notably in Poland and Afghanistan). Second, Communism became ideologically bankrupt — by the 1980s, Soviet leaders had stopped viewing themselves as saviours of mankind and had lost their political will to survive. Third, Gorbachev played a crucial role by seeking to replace the old apparatus with a new breed of officials who he thought would purge communism of Stalinist oppression and lead it into the next century. As could be expected, ordinary Soviets used their new-found freedom to relegate Marxism-Leninism, not just Stalinism, to the dustbin of history.

This analysis leads Revel to adopt an original position in the “end-of-history” debate. He shares Francis Fukuyama’s faith that capitalist democracy, as the best form of social system ever invented, will ultimately replace the others. But in the short term at least, he points out that history is made of men’s actions — it is up to them to move ahead or backwards. “A political analyst might, with solid arguments, say to a condemned man on whose neck the guillotine is about to fall: ‘Don’t worry, this execution belongs to an obsolete moment in history’. But in doing so he only confirms that nine tenths of what happens to us is made of the dregs of an earlier era.” The Chinese students might well one day be free, but not the ones who were crushed in Tiananmen Square. “Of course in the long run, it is probable that China will take a liberal course. But in politics I care about the short run, because life is short.”

The second half of the book analyses current challenges to the democratic resurgence. Despite growing awareness in developing countries that political and economic freedoms are vital pre-conditions, not by-products, of development, it will take a cultural revolution for those freedoms to take root in the Third World. As long as most Muslims reject the separation of Church and State, for instance, Arab countries will remain in the grip of tyranny and poverty. In the Eastern bloc, dealing with the psychological after-shocks of communism will be an especially daunting task. Even in the developed world, the growth of corruption and apathy threatens to undermine the moral foundation of free societies.

Democracy and human rights, Revel concludes, will prevail only if people believe in them and take actions to defend them. He stresses in particular the moral duty of international intervention: dictators should not be allowed a free reign of terror within their own borders.

Le Regain démocratique is a major political essay written in the razor-sharp style of a born pamphleteer. As was the case with Revel’s previous works, the aficionados will relish the clarity, the trenchant metaphors and the crushing wit; the others, after gritting their teeth through the first few chapters, will probably throw away the book and conclude that the author is a hopeless conservative.

Revel, in fact, is an uncompromising liberal — in the old European sense of the word and in the American “cold-war liberal” tradition. The American columnist George Will once elegantly defined the conservative as “a pessimist who goes though life hoping to be proven wrong.” Only by that standard could Revel be called a conservative.

Henri Astier

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This one-volume edition of Jean-Francois Revel’s two-part Histoire de la philosophie occidentale (first published in the late 1960s) covers thinkers from the pre-Socratics to Kant. It is a jargon-free narrative intended for general readers, not a treatise for philosophy students — “Histoire” is meant as “story” rather than “history”. But neither is it a bland “Western-civ-for-infants” manual — Revel has a serious point, which he makes with both gusto and erudition: philosophy is dead.

In a nutshell, philosophy arose from men’s desire to make sense of the world around them without resorting to religion. Early Ionian thinkers (notably Thales and Herodotus) had a passion for observing nature and founded philosophy on the rejection of myth. But the search for hidden truths, and the discarding of outward phenomena, made a comeback with Plato. For the next two mellenia, philosophers oscillated between two conceptions of knowledge, one emphasizing concrete observation and the other general theories of a deeper reality.

This, Revel argues, changed with the birth of modern science as a separate branch of inquiry. Philosophers faced a difficult choice: they could either focus on their core metaphysical activities and drift towards brainy triviality (Descartes), or embrace empiricism, which meant winding up the business (Kant). The irrelevance of modern philosophy is not argued with any hostility — the author used to teach the subject. Incidentally, the book marked the end of philosophy for Revel, who focused on politics after the success of Without Marx or Jesus in 1970. His central message, however, remained the same: men achieve knowledge by trying hard to look at reality as it is, not as they would like it to be.

Henri Astier

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Pierre Boncenne, Pour Jean-François Revel: Un esprit libre
Plon, 343 pages, 21 euros, ISBN 2-259-19920-8

Pierre Boncenne has written the first book ever about Jean-François Revel. The fact that it was published after his death goes a long way towards proving its main point – the greatest French thinker of his age was also the most misunderstood.

Others – such as Michel Foucault, Claude Lévy-Strauss, Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Bourdieu, Philippe Sollers – were the subjects of countless studies during their lifetimes. Roland Barthes even wrote a tribute to himself as part of Le Seuil’s prestigious “Écrivains de toujours” series of monographs. Jacques Derrida, perhaps the greatest French intellectual star since Sartre, was celebrated in a feature film and his death in 2005 was front-page news all over the world.

Not so Revel. There was little fuss when he died in April. French papers carried a few (mostly lukewarm) tributes, but other media ignored the event. France-Culture, the thinking Frenchman’s radio of choice, did not mention it on its website and did not broadcast a discussion of Revel’s work until eight months later. As one commentator remarked: “Revel is treated like people with a readership of one.”

And yet he was hardly obscure. All his books since Without Marx or Jesus (1970) have been worldwide successes. A one-time leading newspaper editor, Revel had extensive connections. Political leaders at home and abroad consulted him; he was a close friend of Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Saul Bellow. His stature grew with age: during his final decade he joined the Académie Française, published five hugely successful books, and was a regular guest on TV and radio.

How can such an influential insider be treated like a marginal figure? Why did he pioneer a new genre he called “the reviled best-seller”? These questions lie at the heart of Pierre Boncenne’s outstanding book. Pour Jean François Revel is not just the intellectual portrait of a man, but also an account of France’s cultural life in the past half-century and its peculiar workings. Boncenne draws on interviews from many writers, foremost among whom is the sinologist Simon Leys, a fellow friend and admirer of Revel. Leys has had his share of problems with the Paris establishment but is now held in considerable respect, and Boncenne’s frequent references to him serve to reinforce his contention that Revel too deserves to be regarded as a major author.

The case against Revel centres on his militant anti-communism. Alone among France’s top journalists, he openly challenged Communist leader George Marchais, with damning revelations about his wartime past and party funding by Moscow. Marchais called him “a scoundrel”. Some of Revel’s sharpest barbs were directed at democrats, particularly his fellow left-wingers, who bowed to Marxist intimidation. He saw the alliance between France’s socialists and communists from the early 1970s as a betrayal. In The Totalitarian Temptation (1976) and How Democracies Perish (1983) Revel analysed with passionate intensity the 1001 ways in which self-styled progressives engaged in doublethink and connived at Soviet aggressiveness.

What put Revel beyond the pale was not anti-communism per se: the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in 1973 had a deep impact in France and criticism of the Soviet Union was occasionally voiced on the left. The French “antitotalitarians” revived a political trend that had died out in America in the 1960s: cold-war liberalism. But to the extent that the French tolerated anti-communism, they liked it sugar-coated. Any condemnation of Moscow and its far-flung clients had to be balanced by denunciations of right-wing dictatorships, to show that the critic was not a fascist sympathiser. Revel called this requirement the “great taboo” of his time – and he cheerfully broke it.

Communism and fascism may have been each other’s enemies, but both were above all enemies of freedom. Revel felt it should be possible to censure one without appearing to condone the other, from a strictly democratic standpoint. Having risked his life fighting Nazi occupation of his country, he did not see the need to scatter his shots by engaging in ritual anti-fascism, and focused on what he identified as the main threat to democratic civilization after 1945: communism.

This single-mindedness earned him the scorn of smart opinion. For 20 years after The Totalitarian Temptation, Le Monde never mentioned a single book by Revel. He was shunned by reference books until the late 1990s – when his admission to the Académie Française automatically qualified him for entry in the Larousse dictionary. By then many lesser figures had been there for years.

His name continues to smack of heresy to this day, notes Boncenne, who suggests a neat “Revel test”. Mention him in polite company and watch the shocked reaction: “Don’t tell me you like this right-wing pig!” All Revel aficionados have experienced this. The enduring “Revel-is-a-reactionary” meme explains the deafening silence that followed his death.

The widespread view that he was an obsessive cold-warrior is rooted in a misconception that Revel himself identified three decades ago: anti-communism is not seen as deriving from observation or reflection, but from irrational hostility. When Soviet dissidents told the world about the persecution they endured, the reaction among many in the West was not so much to consider the crimes, but to question the motives of those who were swayed by them. Revel lampooned this attitude thus:

“The facts revealed by Solzhenitsyn should not lead the unbiased observer to form a negative opinion of communism. On the contrary, it was the prior contamination of their souls by anti-communism that made them susceptible to such rumours and induced them to… spread them, thus abetting the plot which (the most incriminating clue of all) was being orchestrated at precisely that time!”

An encyclopaedic mind with many interests, Revel did not confine himself to politics. He wrote a History of Western Philosophy – which rivals Bertrand Russell’s – as well as books about art, poetry, cuisine, and literature. This probably counted against him in a country where heavyweights tend to claim exclusive rights over specific fields.

Revel broke the French intellectual mould in the style as much as the substance of his writings. He had a gift for crystal-clear prose, and for compressing complex ideas into arresting formulas. On the immunity from scandal a top-heavy constitution confers on the president, he wrote: “In France the person held responsible is not the one who gives orders, but the one who receives them.” He argued against cultural protectionism and government attempts to curb imports from Hollywood thus: “Nothing would please me more, as a viewer, than to bathe every night in an invigorating flow of Albanian, Tanzanian or Burmese filmography – on one condition: that the choice should be mine.”

Revel’s biting irony often makes you laugh out loud, and this too counted against him: a great author is not supposed to amuse you. As Boncenne notes, Revel had more than wit – he had humour, the power to turn his irony against himself. This is most obvious in his 1997 autobiography, but early in his career he had emphasized the need for both individuals and groups not to take themselves too seriously. “One can assess the degree of civilization of a society by its capacity to make itself an object of ridicule or contempt,” he wrote in 1958. Thus France’s propensity to pose as an example drew one of his sharpest barbs: “French culture has radiated for so long that it’s a wonder mankind hasn’t died from sunstroke.”

Revel’s pugnacious style led many to dismiss him as a “pamphleteer”. He did not object the label – pamphlets have a long tradition in France, going back at least to Pascal’s Provinciales – but he rejected the implication that it is an inferior genre. “There is no effective polemic without solid content, without underlying truthfulness,” he wrote. Equating vigorous prose with lack of substance is the mark of superficial minds that confuse obscurity with profundity.

Revel sought to reach out to the layman rather than impress the literati. He avoided high-flown language, lengthy footnotes, and other trappings of “seriousness”. Boncenne notes that his decision in the mid-1960s to work for Robert Laffont, a subsidiary of Time-Life regarded as low brow, rather than a prestigious publisher such as Gallimard or Le Seuil, reflects a lifelong preference for a wider audience over the elite. Reactions to his books reflected this choice: the public lapped them up, critics and academics shrugged them off.

Revel did not belong to a coterie – a drawback in a culture that prizes neat intellectual labels. During his time he saw trendy schools come and go: phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, deconstructionism, postmodernism. Revel punctured the pretensions of these cliques and never created one himself. The only French school he can be associated with is “libéralisme”, in the old-fashioned sense that stresses individual liberty and small government. He is the latest in a line that includes Montesquieu, Tocqueville and Raymond Aron.

In the Anglo-Saxon world, the figure he is closest to is another intellectual loner: George Orwell. Boncenne points out the deep similarities between the two: the obsession with clear writing, the view of communism as a deadly threat to socialism, and – above all – the exposure of man’s resistance to facts and vulnerability to ideology.

Boncenne rightly regards The Flight from Truth (La Connaissance inutile, 1988) as Revel’s most profound essay. It is also his most Orwellian. The book explores in detail the human ability to ignore data that do no fit pre-conceived ideas. Like Orwell, Revel saw our preference for mental comfort over information as fateful for democracy. Both rejected the widespread view that “there is no objective truth”. The great weakness of totalitarian systems is that there is a real world they cannot change: remove any possible confrontation with facts and you lose the main weapon against powers that are relying on propaganda to get inside your head.

This reviewer has no doubt that Jean-François Revel will one day achieve the recognition he deserves. And Boncenne’s book will be seen as groundbreaking – the first comprehensive tribute to one of the most eloquent champions of liberty in the 20th century.

Henri Astier

See also some other details on the book in french here.

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Les invités sont:

– Pierre Boncenne.
- Jean-François Sirinelli.
- Alain Besancon.
- Jacques Julliard.

Présentation par Brice Couturier.

Critiques de l’émission:

• Par Hoplite
• Par Sardanapale

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Jean François Revel, La grande parade, Essai sur la survie de l’utopie socialiste. Paris: Plon, 346p., F129 (€19,66) 2-259-19056-1

Reviewed by: Henri Astier

Before the collapse of communism many people on the left in the west took a bleak view of the world. Capitalism, which puts profits before people and fosters inequality, was bad; in communist countries bureaucrats had hijacked the revolution, and that was bad too. After the Berlin Wall fell, however, few radicals celebrated. Their worldview, if anything, is now bleaker than before. The peoples of the world don’t even have two evils to choose from; capitalism reigns unchecked, making the world safe for corporate plunder. Why does an increasing body of opinion believe this? What assumptions are these ideas based on? How influential are they?

Jean-François Revel, a long-time critic of the left’s fascination with Marxism, tackles these questions in La grande parade – the French word here primarily means “parry”, as in boxing. What progressives have successfully dodged, he argues, is the reality check that the end of communism should have brought about. At the time, most observers drew two main lessons. One was that communism was beyond redemption. The other was that liberal capitalism – markets underpinned by the rule of law — was the only way forward. But by the mid-1990s the left had launched a counter-offensive on both fronts. Liberalism was again denounced as fundamentally iniquitous, and the hope for a good, non-capitalist order was revived. Revel contends that the end of communism actually galvanised the radicals: “Now they were free,” he writes, “to idolize unreservedly a socialism restored to its pristine condition – utopia.”

A prime example of this flight from reality, according to Revel, is the battle over the Black Book of Communism. When it was published in France in 1997, the book was condemned by many on the left as an attempt to exculpate the Nazis and legitimise right-wing extremism. Le Monde noted that the publication coincided with a meeting of the far-right National Front. But Revel’s interpretation of the Black Book controversy turns the tables: politically motivated progressives, he says, were engaged in a posthumous defence of communism, designed to gloss over its crimes.

One might object that the Black Book’s critics were not defending communists: they were only denying that you could equate them with Nazis. Regardless of the undisputed crimes committed in its name, communism meant well. But such an objection only bolsters Revel’s basic claim: the “ultraleft”, as he calls it, is intent on rescuing communist ideals from the Soviet wreckage. Revel notes wrily that this is inconsistent with praxis – reality, as Marx insisted, should never be confused with the professed intentions of social actors. Since communism, everywhere and at all times, has resulted in political repression, the argument that it was at heart a good idea must be based on a complete retreat from observable reality. A Black Book-style body count, Revel persuasively concludes, is abhorrent to those who refuse to judge communism on the evidence only.

Revel also shows that reluctance to take stock of communism is not confined to the “ultraleft”. In 1997 Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, a moderate socialist, jumped into the fray over the Black Book by praising the French Communist Party as a force for progress. President Jacques Chirac, in a 1999 speech commemorating the killing of villagers by Nazis at Oradour-sur-Glane in 1944, condemned “all” atrocities down the ages – from the massacres of Huguenots to the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. In his otherwise comprehensive overview of man’s inhumanity, Chirac did not mention a single communist crime.

Revel identifies a “most favoured totalitarianism” clause: remembering the Nazis is rightly considered a duty, but those trying to keep the memory of communist crimes alive are dismissed as reactionary holdovers from the Cold War. Denying the Holocaust is a crime in many countries, known as “negationism” in France. “Pronazi negationists are only a handful,” Revel notes. “Procommunist negationists are legion.”
Deying the criminal nature of communism is just phase one of “opération grande parade”; phase two consists in affirming the criminal nature of capitalism. Economic liberalism, Revel writes, is “universally” reviled. “Hold on!” one might say. “Governments all over the world are falling over themselves to open their markets!” True, Revel replies, but few preach what they practice. In France, a reluctant convert to market discipline, politicians of all stripes avoid the L-word like the plague. “Non, nous ne sommes pas libéraux!” protested Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former socialist minister. Alain Juppé, a former conservative prime minister, once described liberalism as a “jungle”.

Liberalism, Revel goes on, is now routinely blamed for many social ills – from the adjustment problems of former communist economies, to child labour in developing countries and environmental damage everywhere. The eco-warriors, street-reclaimers and sundry anti-capitalists who recently demonstrated in Seattle, Washington and London are not the only, or even the most eloquent, exponents of such views. In a famous 1997 article for the Atlantic Monthly the financier George Soros argued that the spread of market values endangered democracy and fostered inequality. The British public apparently agrees. In May 2000 Channel 4 television aired a programme entitled “New Labour on Trial”, in which Tony Blair’s government was being prosecuted from an Old Labour, anti-liberal perspective; by a margin of almost two to one, a jury of 250 people, said to be representative of the population, pronounced the Prime Minister guilty of being a control freak and turning his back on the poor.

Revel points out that critics attribute to capitalism the characteristics of totalitarianism. John Gray, in his 1998 book False Dawn, described “liberal ideology” as a utopia. Economic liberalism is also often said to be a dictatorship: governments are no longer accountable to people but to corporations. France’s leading anti-capitalist author, Vivianne Forrester, whose new book is entitled Une étrange dictature, told a recent television show that “we are experiencing a form of totalitarianism”.

The widespread idea that behind capitalism’s benign surface lurks a monster is rarely challenged – even in market-friendly Britain. A recent remark by the left-wing politician Ken Livingstone that “every year the international financial system kills more people than Hitler” drew mostly mild rebuke. Britain’s leading liberal publication, The Economist, commented that Mr Livingstone “still allows his wild mouth to get the better of him.” Londoners took the remark even less seriously and elected him mayor of a city that contains Europe’s main financial centre. Compare this with the international furore over the Black Book’s (much better documented) contention that communism killed more people than Hitler.

Revel observes that the debate between liberals and their critics is warped by a basic misunderstanding. Capitalism is often viewed as an ideology, a socialism in reverse. Markets, it’s often said, are not the answer to everything – as if anyone had ever made such a silly claim. “Since socialism was conceived in the delusion that it could resolve all problems,” Revel writes, “its supporters attribute the same conceit to their contradictors.” But unlike socialism, capitalism was never a blueprint for an ideal society: it evolved by trial and error down the centuries. Capitalism is not so much a doctrine as it is a process by which new arrangements are being tested. Anti-capitalism, Revel concludes, boils down to a hatred of progress.

La grande parade is not just a passionate defence of classical liberalism and an attempt to puncture the enduring appeal of the socialist utopia. Like all of Revel’s earlier work, it’s above all a reflection on people’s capacity for dismissing the evidence before them. Mario Vargas-Llosa once compared Revel to another great anti-totalitarian thinker, George Orwell. This powerfully sensible book could indeed have been prefaced with a sentence from Orwell’s 1946 article, In Front of your Nose: “The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proven wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.”

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