A Cultural Coup d’Etat

American conservatives periodically agonize over possible ways of inducing the United States to return—or advance—to more traditional values and policies. And after all the talk, the conclusion is usually to do something on the order of endowing more university chairs for anti-Keynesian economics professors, or campaigning for political candidates who favor tax cuts. It never seems to occur to anybody that what is really needed is a cultural take-over.

Yet it can be done—I’ve watched it happen in France. Over the past three or four years, fully half of France’s intellectual and cultural life has come under the direction of the Right. However, this shift was not so sudden as it may seem. For years, “libéraux” (what in America would be called conservatives) in the French government had sought to encourage the creation of a right-wing counterpart to the extremely influential leftist daily, Le Monde. They had little success, though, until Robert Hersant, owner of dozens of provincial newspapers, appeared on the Paris scene to put up the money and the organizational talent. The other great daily, Le Figaro, passed into his hands (as did, successively, the evening and morning papers France-Soir and L‘Aurore). To run Le Figaro, Hersant assembled a team of young right-wingers, headed by Louis Pauwels and Alain de Benoist. Meanwhile, he retained many of Le Figaro’s renowned columnists—members of the French Academy such as Pierre Gaxotte, Maurice Druon, Thierry Maulnier, and Eugene Ionesco. One sad consequence of Hersant’s coup d’état was that Le Figaro lost the services of Raymond Aron. But even that loss turned into a gain when Aron joined the editorial staff of the mass-circulation weekly L’Express, in which conservatives (the French libéraux) now hold a majority of the stock.

TM

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Thomas Molnar

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Europe

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American conservatives periodically agonize over possible ways of inducing the United States to return—or advance—to more traditional values and policies. And after all the talk, the conclusion is usually to do something on the order of endowing more university chairs for anti-Keynesian economics professors, or campaigning for political candidates who favor tax cuts. It never seems to occur to anybody that what is really needed is a cultural take-over.

Yet it can be done—I’ve watched it happen in France. Over the past three or four years, fully half of France’s intellectual and cultural life has come under the direction of the Right. However, this shift was not so sudden as it may seem. For years, “libéraux” (what in America would be called conservatives) in the French government had sought to encourage the creation of a right-wing counterpart to the extremely influential leftist daily, Le Monde. They had little success, though, until Robert Hersant, owner of dozens of provincial newspapers, appeared on the Paris scene to put up the money and the organizational talent. The other great daily, Le Figaro, passed into his hands (as did, successively, the evening and morning papers France-Soir and L‘Aurore). To run Le Figaro, Hersant assembled a team of young right-wingers, headed by Louis Pauwels and Alain de Benoist. Meanwhile, he retained many of Le Figaro’s renowned columnists—members of the French Academy such as Pierre Gaxotte, Maurice Druon, Thierry Maulnier, and Eugene Ionesco. One sad consequence of Hersant’s coup d’état was that Le Figaro lost the services of Raymond Aron. But even that loss turned into a gain when Aron joined the editorial staff of the mass-circulation weekly L’Express, in which conservatives (the French libéraux) now hold a majority of the stock.