November 12, 2005
Gallic Disruptions
By William F. Buckley
The French turmoil is explained, by many who have trained their eyes on it,
as a reaction to continued French discrimination. To give evidence of this,
the critics cite preferences shown by employers to applicants whose names are
indisputably French, with no Algerian or Muslim overtones. One story cited resumes
with straightforward French names receiving 50 times the presumptive hospitality
shown to applicants with Muslim surnames. And every third or fourth story cites
what continues to be thought the matrix of French political life, which is the
revolution.
There are those who hoped, hopelessly, that Charles de Gaulle would take advantage
of his historical eminence to jettison the revolution. Not a chance. His farewell
toast to the nation that finally rejected him was, "Vive la France, Vive la
Revolution." A few years earlier he had contributed to the pacification of Canada,
by saying, while visiting Montreal, "Vive le Quebec libre. Vive le Canada francais."
One is perhaps grateful that, in the modern mode, the execution block dispatches
automobiles, rather than dukes and counts and failed politicians. But if it
is true that the protesters in the year 2005 are inflamed by the tradition of
a revolutionary past, then we have at least one reason for resistance to upward
mobility among second-generation French with parents born in Algeria. Such young
men inherit not only the tradition of French revolution as the answer to life's
shortcomings, but also Algerian revolution. First, against French colonialism;
second, against victors over French colonialism; third, over victors over the
victors over French colonialism.
Round and round it went in Algeria, more than a million bloody victims of dissatisfaction
and irresolution. If the Algerian tradition is invoked in order to understand
the French-Algerian community, there is some clarity at both ends -- the French
who are suspicious of the second-class French-Algerian citizens, and the French-Algerian
citizens who resent the long, hard road of integration.
President Chirac announced on Thursday that he would not discuss the unrest
until after it had been quieted. That condition had the familiar sound of the
warden who will not discuss the prisoners' demands until their havoc is done.
It is the sensible course to take, but it does not automatically quiet the fervor.
If the planted axiom of the protesters is that only revolution can bring progress,
then the staunching of revolutionary activity is a step in the wrong direction,
capitulationist, defeatist.
What, on the other hand, the revolutionists lack is a program concrete enough
to give them any sense of satisfactions achievable. In 1959, the objective was
pretty plain: the secession of Algeria as a department of France. A hundred
and seventy years before, the objective was the overthrow of the monarchy and
of a ruling aristocratic class. What would satisfy the existing revolutionaries
as a corporate ideal? The elimination of the automobile? If so, it being obvious
that that is never going to happen, then the contrapositive needs to be considered:
the revolution will be endless. That is formal logic.
The French are disposed to violent protesting, as we saw in 1968. It required
the majestic authority of Charles de Gaulle to stabilize the nation, but that
year, France had the bad company of revolutionary protests in many parts of
the world, notably Mexico City, Rome and Tokyo. It would be just to say about
the French that there is a disposition to revolutionary activity in the Gallic
gene that does not afflict Great Britain and Germany, let alone the United States,
where multiculturalism is now a way of life.
No modern country has had a greater calcification of discrimination than our
own, where an entire race was first enslaved and then ghettoized for a hundred
years. But those who thought of protests framed in revolutionary activity found
there was not much patience for violence, and gave it up after riots in a few
ghettoes and college campuses.
In France there is the modern piquancy of tender loving state care for the revolutionary
class, which receives free medicine, free education, and free welfare checks
and unemployment checks. Whether that paradox will awaken counterrevolutionary
cunning in the government of Jacques Chirac remains to be seen.
Copyright 2005 Universal Press Syndicate
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-11_12_05_WB.html