ICFFS-Cultural Memory Program

The elimination of the socialist candidate in the last French presidential elections stunned the country and ushered in what promises to be a long-lasting crisis within the French Left. In the immediate aftermath of the election, many blamed Lionel Jospin's poor showing on the moderate, reformist nature of his campaign platform, which failed to mobilize working-class voters and the youth.
Revolutionary rhetoric was not the only element missing from Jospin's political program. References to the Republican legacy, the other component of the Left's traditional self-definition, were equally absent. However, the last minute mobilization against Jean-Marie Le Pen that followed the election was called for in the name of a necessary "sursaut républicain," a rallying of the electorate behind Jacques Chirac in order to safeguard democratic institutions.

Chirac himself made frequent references to the time-tested principles of 1789, adapted to the requirements of the moment. This eleventh-hour outpouring of Republican rhetoric in the media and political speeches was in sharp contrast to the previous months: the only candidate who had actively campaigned for the defense of Republican principles threatened by globalization and the decline of national sovereignty, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, received little more than 5% of the vote.

What is to be made of this apparent divorce between political rhetoric and electoral reality? Has la République altogether dropped out of France's cultural memory? Recent publications bearing titles such as "La République expliquée à ma fille" (R. Debray,1998) and "L'amour de la France expliqué à mon fils" (Max Gallo, 1999) seem to confirm the vanishing nature of national-republican memory in contemporary France. The need for these self-appointed guardians of the faith to write such books points to the fact that civil society and the State are perceived as failing in their mission to teach the youth the main tenets of the Republican political culture. The inability of the public school system, once the premier ideological apparatus of the Republican state, to properly socialize the citizenry, stands at the core of the public intellectuals' critique of recent political and cultural developments.

The paper proposes to examine the strategies deployed and arguments advanced by those who see their mission as countering the public schools' failure to maintain the memory of the Republic alive in a "postpolitical” era dominated by entertainment media and transnational realignments.




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