Régis Debray is a French left-wing intellectual, mostly known for his participation in Che Guevara's failed guerilla campaign in Bolivia in 1967. Debray's life was saved by the intercession of French president Charles De Gaulle, a man Debray (and the rest of the French left) loved to hate. Years later (1993, to be exact), an older, wiser(?) but just as pseudo-intellectually talkative Debray penned an article in defense of his old nemesis, published in English as “Charles De Gaulle: Futurist of the Nation”. Most of the little book is frankly unreadable due to the babbling style of the author. Or is it some kind of ironic Paris café humor I just don't understand? The translator's footnotes don't help much either, although I suppose it's a good thing to get esoteric cultural references to “Monsieur de Lapalisse”, “Diderot's paradox” and “the Mourousi game” explained once and for all. And yes, the Hexagon is a reference to Marianne herself.
Somewhere among the verbal debrise, Debray does say something interesting, so interesting in fact that I first heard about “Futurist of the Nation” from a rather awkward Swedish blog situated somewhat uneasily to the political right of Genghis Khan (or is it Pétain).
Despite his vaunted leftism, Debray argues that war, nations and nationalism are forever with us, and that history is a never-ending cycle of progress and regress, the “progress” often leading to surprising regresses. Some of his examples (this was written in 1993, remember) are prescient: more democracy in the Arab world breeds more Muslim fundamentalism, more capitalism in Russia will simply breed an authoritarian reaction further down the road, and the stronger the European Union becomes, the more nationalist and regionalist will her people's become…
To Debray, this means that Realpolitik is the order of the day. France needs a nuclear deterrence. A European *union* might be desirable, but actual European *unity* is a pipe dream due to the necessary balance of power between France, Germany and Britain. As traditional class conflicts á la Marxism become less important, nationalism and foreign policy conflicts will become more so. Charles De Gaulle wasn't the last man of the 19th century, but rather the first man of the 21st, while the “modern” Miterrand (“leftist” French president 1981-1995) is really a complacent fossil.
Debray has a contradictory view of the nation. On the one hand, he makes the typically French distinction between a nation based on a shared republican philosophy and a “tribe” based on blood-ties, preferring the former. Indeed, Debray says that the choice facing France is between De Gaulle's nation and Le Pen's tribe – another prescient prediction. (The “Le Pen” of his book is Marine Le Pen's father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the Front National.) However, Debray also says that the nation is an old, almost primordial and very resilient idea, which somehow survives beneath all the political and economic transformations. But this, surely, *is* Le Pen's “tribe”, not the “elective nation” of modern French nationalism! What “nation” does Debray want the left to come to terms with?
Sometimes, I get the feeling that Debray hasn't left the revolutionary hero-worship of his youth very far behind. He says that the left was looking for great leaders in China, Cuba and elsewhere, somehow not noticing that another great leader (i.e. De Gaulle) was available right at their doorstep. De Gaulle, of course, was often criticized by the leftists and liberals for his autocratic, “Bonapartist” tendencies. To Debray, support for this French strongman isn't all that different from venerating revolutionary leaders in the Third World, making me wonder what he *really* saw in, say, Che Guevara or Fidel Castro.
It would be unfair to accuse Debray of “fascism”. Many of his points are salient, after all. Nor does he call for the formation of camelots-du-roi (or camelots-de-Gaulle). Still, I cannot help wondering whether Debray has read his Sorel, the chapter on “myths”, and decided to throw in his lot (at least in retrospect) with the old general (or the charismatic Conducator) who in Debray's feverish mind embodies the Futurist Myth of the Nation…
Did I say it was badly written?
No comments:
Post a Comment