The French declaration of independence
2004; Routledge; Volume: 8; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/1026021042000247081
ISSN1740-9306
Autores Tópico(s)French Historical and Cultural Studies
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Guy Sorman, cited in the Wall Street Journal (March 27, 2000). See Serge Halimi, “Un mot de trop,” and “Les ‘philo‐américains’ saisis par la rage,” in Le Monde Diplomatique (May 2000). See Marilyn Young, “Dreaming of World War II, Living with Vietnam,” http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?pid = 354 See Prabhat Patnaik, Whatever Happened to Imperialism and Other Essays (New Delhi: Tulika Press, 1995), 102–06. See Chapter 10 of Pierre Jalée's L'Impérialisme en 1970 (Paris: Maspero, 1969) for an example of Vietnam‐era French theorizing about American imperialism. The ubiquity of this analysis can be measured by a phrase written in 1956 by Roland Barthes, who was not at all known primarily as a “third‐worldist”: “Today it is the colonized peoples who assume to the full the ethical and political condition described by Marx as being that of the proletariat.” Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972) 148. For a sense of the ideological dimension of the movement, read the texts and pamphlets assembled by Alain Schnapp and Pierre Vidal‐Naquet, Journal de la commune étudiante. Textes et documents. Novembre 1967‐Juin 1968 (Paris: Seuil, 1969). On the memory of May '68 in France, see my May '68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). For a more extended version of this argument, see Chapter Three of my May '68 and Its Afterlives; see also Jean‐Pierre Garnier and Roland Lew, “From the Wretched of the Earth to the Defense of the West: An Essay on Left Disenchantment in France,” in The Socialist Register (1984): 299–323. The best known anti‐third‐worldist book was Pascal Bruckner's Le Sanglot de l'homme blanc (Paris: Seuil, 1983), which appeared in English as Tears of the White Man (New York: Free Press, 1986). And vigilant they have remained. From the early 1980s, when Lévy signed a petition published in Le Monde urging Ronald Reagan to increase support to the Contras in Nicaragua, and when Glucksmann supported the French invasion of Chad, to the present, the politics of these extremely vocal editorialists has remained consistent. During the US invasion of Iraq, they were characteristically loud in proclaiming an alliance with the United States. Their stance was that of solitary, isolated, dissident men of justice, bone‐weary from being forced to lead the battle for liberty and modernity against what Bruckner and Glucksmann, referring to widespread French opposition to the war, called “the quasi‐Soviet ambiance that has welded together 90% of the population into the triumph of a monolithic way of thinking,” and, in the same text, “the nationalism of imbeciles.” From “La Faute,” in Le Monde (April 15, 2003). While Lévy claimed afterwards to have opposed the war, any opposition he expressed was drowned out by his adamant self‐characterization as an “anti‐anti‐American.” The manifesto, which issued from the Institute for American Values, was published in a number of newspapers in Europe and Japan, and appeared in Le Monde on February 15, 2002 under the title of “Lettre d'Amérique.” Signed by sixty American intellectuals and college professors, including Michael Walzer, Francis Fukuyama, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Samuel Huntington, the text proposed a number of definitive ethical values characterizing the American Way of Life, a way of life targeted by the attack on the Trade Towers. See Jacques Rancière, “Le 11 septembre et après: une rupture de l'ordre symbolique?” Lignes 8 (May 2002): 35–46. For a history of French hatred of the French Revolution and the Republic, see David Martin‐Castelnau, Les Francophobes (Paris: Fayard, 2002). For an example of this kind of writing in English, see Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). François Furet, cited in Halimi, “Les ‘philo‐américains.’ ” Far from being a sectional or corporatist revolt, the 1995 strikes, in the words of one union delegate, were “a conflict of existence” (cited in M. Kail, “Tous ensemble. Une grève se gère par les grévistes,” Les Temps Modernes 587 (March/April 1996): 549; as one railway worker remarked one week into the strike: “We are no longer fighting for ourselves, we are on strike for all wage earners. To start with I was on strike as a train driver, then as a railway worker, then as a public sector worker, and now it's as a wage earner that I'm on strike.” A nurse, active in the strikes, recounts: “If I felt concerned again it's because this time it was about essential demands, political demands…It was the rejection of a capitalist society, the rejection of money. People were mobilized more against that than against the Juppé plan…” (cited in Jim Wolfreys, “Class Struggles in France,” in International Socialism 84 (1999): 37). Erik Izraelewicz, “La première révolte contre la mondialisation,” Le Monde (Dec. 9, 1995). The Economist (Dec. 9, 1995), cited in Serge Halimi, Les nouveaux chiens de garde (Paris: Editions Raison d'Agir, 1997) 71. See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu's La Misère du monde (Paris: Seuil, 1993), and Viviane Forrester's L'Horreur Economique (Paris: Fayard, 1996). Recent popular books dealing with American imperialism or anti‐Americanism include Philippe Roger's L'Ennemi américain: essai d'une généalogie de l'antiaméricanisme français (Paris: Seuil, 2002); Noel Mamère's Non merci, Oncle Sam (Paris: Ramsay, 1999); Nicholas Guyatt's Encore un siècle américain? (Paris: Enjeux planètes, 2002); Emmanuel Todd's Après l'empire: essai sur la décomposition du système américain, (Paris: Gallimard, 2002); and Jean‐François Revel's L'Obsession anti‐américaine (Paris: Plon, 2002). See Philippe Raynaud, “Les nouvelles radicalités: de l'extrême gauche en philosophie,” in Le Débat 105 (May‐August 1999): 90–116. See Samir Amin, “Confronting the Empire,” in Monthly Review 55:3 (July‐August 2003): 15–22. Immanuel Wallerstein makes a related argument. The US attack on Iraq, in his view, was primarily designed to intimidate Europe: “This was an attack on Europe, and that is why Europe responded in the way that it did.” Peter Gowan shares this perspective: “The American attack on Iraq had a number of objectives […] but among the global targets, ending the growing cohesion and influence of Western Europe was central.” See Immanuel Wallerstein, “US Weakness and the Struggle for Hegemony,” in Monthly Review 55:3 (July‐August 2003): 23–29; and Peter Gowan, “US Hegemony Today,” in the same issue, 30–50. Pascal Bruckner, cited in Richard Bernstein, “Press and Public Abroad Seem to Grow ever Angrier about the United States,” New York Times, March 27, 2003.
Referência(s)