Valéry and Helmut

On the night of May 19, Western Europe was listening breathlessly to the returns of Part II of the French presidential elections. Private polls had predicted a neck-and-neck race, and they were right. Had it not been for the fine weather and the successful mobilization of those who are usually far too weary, too cynical, too disgusted by politics to go to the polls, the joint candidate of the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks—that is to say, of the Socialists and Communists—might easily have won. It is depressing to read the newspaper commentaries entitled “The Good Sense of the French People,” “Defeat of the Left,” “Victory for Freedom,” and so on. We have come to regard elections or plebiscites as expressions of “the voice of the people,” although it is usually little more than half of the voters who are thus arbitrarily identified as The People. What we do not know is the intensity of conviction with which each side voted for its candidate. It is quite possible, I would even say probable, that the votes for the Socialist-Communist candidate, François Mitterrand, represented a more intense desire, a more burning zeal, than those cast for Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.

Meanwhile the unexpressed question most of the opponents of the Marxist Left have at the back of their minds is this: can a country as big and important as France be periodically exposed to the voting process? Can stillfree Europe again and again take such a risk, especially since the French Left does not really believe in the democratic procedure? The Marxists consider it (as Engels did nearly a hundred years ago) merely as a framework for establishing the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which, in actual practice, amounts to the rule of a certain sector of the intelligentsia. Why mount the barricades if one can achieve one’s goal by persuasion and propaganda? The National Socialists showed that a liberal democratic republic, in order to remain true to its principles, must humbly permit its enemies to destroy it by peaceful and legal means. (Few realize, by the way, that François Mitterrand has been moving leftward for some time, having once been an Action Française supporter, a Maurrassian.)

EK

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Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

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On the night of May 19, Western Europe was listening breathlessly to the returns of Part II of the French presidential elections. Private polls had predicted a neck-and-neck race, and they were right. Had it not been for the fine weather and the successful mobilization of those who are usually far too weary, too cynical, too disgusted by politics to go to the polls, the joint candidate of the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks—that is to say, of the Socialists and Communists—might easily have won. It is depressing to read the newspaper commentaries entitled “The Good Sense of the French People,” “Defeat of the Left,” “Victory for Freedom,” and so on. We have come to regard elections or plebiscites as expressions of “the voice of the people,” although it is usually little more than half of the voters who are thus arbitrarily identified as The People. What we do not know is the intensity of conviction with which each side voted for its candidate. It is quite possible, I would even say probable, that the votes for the Socialist-Communist candidate, François Mitterrand, represented a more intense desire, a more burning zeal, than those cast for Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.

Meanwhile the unexpressed question most of the opponents of the Marxist Left have at the back of their minds is this: can a country as big and important as France be periodically exposed to the voting process? Can stillfree Europe again and again take such a risk, especially since the French Left does not really believe in the democratic procedure? The Marxists consider it (as Engels did nearly a hundred years ago) merely as a framework for establishing the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which, in actual practice, amounts to the rule of a certain sector of the intelligentsia. Why mount the barricades if one can achieve one’s goal by persuasion and propaganda? The National Socialists showed that a liberal democratic republic, in order to remain true to its principles, must humbly permit its enemies to destroy it by peaceful and legal means. (Few realize, by the way, that François Mitterrand has been moving leftward for some time, having once been an Action Française supporter, a Maurrassian.)