Successful political leaders in France (perhaps especially on the left) are obliged to be both ideologues and repositories of a collective memory, interpreting the past to their followers and public opinion. By their declarations, discourse and symbolic acts they seek to mobilize collective memory or identity in order to realize a political project. The success of such an enterprise often depends on the degree of correspondence between the syumbols mobilized and the nature of the political project. Following the Socialist Party’s abandonment in the mid-eighties of the ideology with which it had come to power in 1981, the party had difficulty in achieving a convincing revison of its doctrine and identity. While a number of different revisions were inconclusively proposed in the late eighties and early nineties by competing party leaders (notably Rocard, Jospin, and Fabius), in the mid-nineties it was Jospin’s revision which presided over the resurrection of the PS after the successive electoral defeats.

This paper argues that the relative success of Jospin’s “reconstruction” in the second half of the 1900’s owed a good deal to this selective preservation of references to the past and crititque or renewal of others. Thus, for example we saw: a reaffirmation of left/right dualism and the resurrection of the Union de la Gauche, “modernized” by the inclusion of the Verts; the assertion that, historically, Socialism preceded (now discredited) Marxism; and the claim that the French socialist project was based on a “nouvelle alliance” between the excluded, the (now transformed) working class and the middle classes. This was accomplished by a discourse which emphasized the modernity of the solutions proposed by Socialism to the problems posed by globalization.

The paper will analyise a number of Jospin’s key speeches and writings. However, it will also examine aspects of his style in government whose symbolic dimension tookits meaning from implicit comparison with the (Mitterandist) past. Likewise, it will also focus on the symbolic value of some of his major reforms.