The words read oddly today, for two reasons. At the end eta long presidential election campaign, French intellectuals dwell not on France’s greatness but its troubles; on the 40 percent of voters who in the first round of the election east ballots for candidates ranging from Trotskyists to neo-fascists. Second, de Gaulle’s nationalism–his belief in the peculiar greatness of France -seems antiquated, ill-suited to a world with supranational institutions and a global economy increasingly centered on the Pacific Basin. The government of Jacques Chirac, the Gaullist who is France’s new president. will be far more constrained than the general could ever have dreamed. Is there any space left for French nationalism?
It’s easy to think there isn’t. Chirac inherits a country whose unemployment rate - 12.2 percent – is the highest of the big four West European economies. He has said that tackling joblessness is his main priority. But he won’t find it easy. Modern France has, in effect, subordinated an independent social and economic policy to its foreign policy- to its determination to bind a unified Germany into European structures. Like Germany, France is committed to a single European currency by the end of the century. That handcuffs Chirac: he can neither devalue the franc (and hence boost exports) nor increase France’s budget deficit without ruining the prospects of monetary union. If the domestic economy does not turn around, some of Chirac’s key supporters might accept a rift in the France-German partnership. But Alain Juppe, Chirac’s likely prime minister (and foreign minister since 1993) is committed to a strong franc and early monetary union.
If the realities of European policy so limit France’s freedom of action, what’s left of national identity? A lot. In Paris last week there was a Tricolor at every lamppost, and the champagne-sodden crowds outside Chirac’s campaign headquarters burst into the “Marseillaise” so often that even that stirring march became tiresome. You wouldn’t think French nationalism was dead if you were a trade negotiator, beating your head against the French determination to maintain their farmers’ export markets, to protect their language and culture from the imperialism of the perfidious Angle-Saxons (Hollywood, this means you).
To the world outside, French nationalism can sometimes seem self-pitying and annoying. De Gaulle himself was the most infuriating of allies-pulling French forces out of NATO, pushing independence for Quebec. Yet de Gaulle’s nationalism, in the end, made the Western Alliance stronger. A self-confident France is a more reliable ally than a miserable one. The pride that the French have in their country shows us that nationalism doesn’t have to be evil; it doesn’t have to wear the face of a bandoleered thug shelling children in Sarajevo.
That’s why today’s mood in France is so peculiar. Commentators drone on about divisions between a majority for whom life has never been so good, and a class of “the excluded”-students, immigrants, the unskilled unemployed. By France’s high expectations of social cohesion, this may be so (though French social fractures are hairline cracks compared with the canyonwide divisions in America). Yet outsiders can best help not by nodding sympathetically, but by telling the French to stop moaning and remember what they have built since 1945 – a national identity which has survived the forces of the global economy, which gives France a rare sense of unity and which threatens nobody else. De Gaulle’s implication was right: the world would be a better place if everywhere else was so lucky.
