Giscard loves Marianne
Sam White
Paris In publishing an elegantly written essay on France's present and future which has become an immediate runaway best-seller President Giscard d'Estaing has made the most ambitious effort since his election two and a half years ago to win the hearts and minds of the French. It has been a somewhat self-conscious struggle beginning with such slightly grizzly ideas as dining out with 'ordinary' French families and the question is now whether this booklet with its accompanying press and television publicity will do the trick. For the fact is that the presidential fortunes are at present at an almost alarmingly low ebb and that despite his obvious assets of youth and looks, charm and wisdom, he leaves the French not only cold but increasingly sceptical Why this should be so remains something of a mystery but t he key to it probably lies in his background. His family is of bourgeois origin which for generations has identified itself with the aristocracy. Now—after a sheltered childhood and adolescence followed by a brilliant academic career—he found himself after only the briefest period transformed from top civil servant into minister and finally President. This poses new problems of identification for him : he wishes to shed the old at least in the public image and become identified with radical innovation : aristocrat, of course, but one whose heart is in tune with popular aspirations.
The least one can say is that this attempt to give himself a new and 'popular' image has not been a success. It has not won him any friends on the left and brought his own supporters to the border of mutiny. He has made important social changes such as lowering the voting age to eighteen and legalising abortion, but not fundamental ones. His one attempt to do so by introducing a capital gains tax was a fiasco, largely because the law itself was so badly drafted that even the Communists rose up in defence of private property. Politically he has courted the wrong people, whose votegetting potential is negligible and whose opportunism notorious. He has brought into government and even promoted people whom he should have shunned. He has surrounded himself with a clique of friends who bring him only embarrassment. In short, he has been naive. Now he has written this book, French Democracy, which reveals him in an infinitely more favourable light. It is exceedingly well written, closely-argued and is the work of a man who is a liberal to his fingers.
Giscard begins with a vivid account of the astonishing economic transformation that has taken place in France over the past twenty-five years and the political stability that has accompanied it thanks to the Gaullist Constitution. For-the first time in the history of the Republic France now has a Constitution which though fiercely debated at the time of its launching is now generally accepted. This economic progress has blurred class differences, blunted the class struggle and forced the classic Right and the Communists to rethink or even abandon some of their basic dogmas. It has therefore opened the way for a really fruitful debate on the way French society is to develop. Rejecting Marxism as out-of-date, further nationalisation as pointless and even beyond a certain point dangerous, Giscard comes out for a mixed economy in which the state's power is used to remove the major injustices and
the major obstacles to progress.
He then glides on to thinner ice when he goes on to discuss the major reforms that are still needed for a further advance towards a basically classless but what he calls 'pluralist' society. Here he becomes disarmingly vague. The first thing to be done is to end the 'ideological divorce' in France and this will be achieved by losing no opportunity to re inforce the centre at both poles of the politi cal spectrum. The Communists will fade out and are already doing so and this will enable a new type of French social democracy to reappear. At this point critics vary: sortie see Giscard's flat rejection of further nationalisation as slamming the door on any possibility of his co-operating with the Socialists, others on the other hand consider that he leaves the door just wide enough open to permit co-operation with the Socialist leader M Mitterrand should the Left win the coming general elections. The book, as will be seen, is discursive and philosophical in tone and in no way polemical. He is clearly fascinated by Mitterrand and I for one believe he is determined to have a love affair with him. His judgment on the French character seems to me to lie of excessive amiability—'affecting cynicism but basically the most sensitive people in the world'-but his judgment on France is indisputable.
'France,' he writes, 'has ceased to be an archaeological and gastronomic curiosity and has become a respected modern nation.'
The book's sales are now soaring irresistibly to the 100,000 mark and it is at this point that one must say something about the circumstances of its launching. This has involved a publicity campaign of remarkable stridency with occasional lapses into down right vulgarity. For the past ten days the President has been hogging prime television and radio time pushing his own book. This has caused considerable resentment and brought a backwash of feeling against him.
There have also been touches of favouritism about its marketing. Surely it was a mistake to give serial rights of a book by an incum bent President to one favoured weekly and to make the favour more obvious by attempt ing fruitlessly as it turned out—to fix an embargo for reviews for midnight Sunday when the weekly in question would appear on the bookstalls on Monday morning?
The book, incidentally, is dedicated to Marianne and Gavroche, the two mythical symbols of the republic. Giscard depicts them as genteel characters, whereas of course Marianne is something of a shrew and Gavroche a Victor Hugo invention. Gavroche could be a candidate for a remand home. He died on the barricades singing this delightful song which might be his own cornmen tary on Giscard's book : Joie est mon caractere Cest la faute a Voltaire, M isere est mon trousseau C'est la faute a Rousseau, Je sui tombe par terre C'est la faute a Voltaire, Le nez darts le ruisseau C'est la faute a Rousseau.
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