ON the eve of the March 4 balloting for the French National Assembly, the publisher of the Paris daily, Le Monde, wrote a frontpage editorial urging his readers to “take a chance” on the Socialists and vote, at least in the first Sunday’s voting of the two-stage election, for the parliamentary candidates of the party that had allied itself with the Communists. Pronouncing the Socialist Party, for all its weaknesses, as still the party of “human values,” Jacques Fauvet described the Left in France as the primary force for change in the society, and the Right as the still insensitive bastion of privilege, incapable of ordering the society to justice.
Le Monde is the voice of those French intellectuals, particularly the ones influenced by Emmanuel Mounier and other avant-garde Catholic thinkers of the 1920s and 1930s, who still chase the wartime vision of a France purified in the Resistance and realizing the fraternal cooperation prefigured by the 1936 Popular Front. That it should so support the Left is not surprising, nor is the fact that it was wrong both in its judgment of the Left and its expectations of how the voters would view the French political scene. Both errors provide perspective on what is happening in France today and on the difficulty many Frenchmen are having in reconciling themselves to what is happening.
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