Occasional Prose (30 page)

Far from being a star or aspiring to prominence, Revel is very much the citizen, a bourgeois in the old Enlightenment sense of the term—a townsman, fond of domestic tranquillity and the arts of peace and commerce. His nature appears placid, benevolent, easy-going, sentimental, that of a private householder going about his business, reading his newspaper without the expectation of finding his own name in it, an urban Cincinnatus. He has a round, flat “Dutch” face (though he is of pure French blood) that looks as if it had seen service in the battles of William the Silent against the Spanish oppressor. It is a moon face; indeed there seem to be several moons perspicaciously turning in its dial, like in one of those grandfather clocks that keep track of astronomical time. He is a bettor and likes to go to the races, wears a gray suit and carries a briefcase.

Despite the stir of indignation excited by some of his broadsides, his person does not inspire fear or cause a swift turning of heads in a restaurant. His picture, in
L’Express
every week over his column, has something bullish about it, the broad-browed, head-lowered promise of some intransigent charge into the arena, and yet it is a
good
bull, scarcely more than a rambunctious steer. He is occasionally seen on television and once ran for office (Cincinnatus called from the plow) on the Federated Left ticket in the suburban district of Neuilly—not his natural territory. He came in a bad third, behind the Gaullist and the Communist. Notwithstanding the weekly photo in a mass-circulation magazine, his “image” somehow, as if from modesty, retires from circulation; if polled, fewer Parisians could identify J.-F. Revel in the rogue’s gallery of current celebrities than could identify Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Roland Barthes, Michel Rocard, Alain Krivine, or the man, “
La Reynière
,” who writes the restaurant column in
Le Monde
. Not to mention J.-P. Sartre, J.-J. Servan-Schreiber, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Luc Godard, etc.

Yet in terms of meritorious service in the combat against General de Gaulle and Gaullism, the outstanding antagonist was surely not any of the above-named opinion leaders, left or center, nor François Mitterand, nor Lecanuet, but Jean-François Revel. His spirit of contrariety found in the General its absurd predestined windmill to tilt at indefatigably. Three brilliant pamphlets sprang from his pen:
Le style du Général
,
En France: la fin de l’opposition
,
Lettre ouverte à la droite
. He slew de Gaulle again and again, and if the General had more lives than a cat and more heads than a hydra, that did not really daunt Jean-François, though he publicly confessed to battle weariness. In fact, like the deathless General himself, he came back refreshed, reinvigorated, having found a new point of attack, new weapons, generally captured from the enemy camp.

He is still fighting, this time on the left flank.
Ni Marx ni Jésus
, where the old Gaullist bugbear, the United States, is tenderly embraced as an ally, suddenly discovered, in the struggle, is another engagement with the adversary, resurgent in the form of Georges Pompidou, and that adversary’s eternal cohorts, as Revel sees them, of the French Communist Party and the splinter grouplets of the left. If the emphasis here is more on the vacuities of the left, old and new, than it was in some of the preceding pamphlets, it is only a
shift
of emphasis.

From start to finish, Revel has seen the so-called left as the right’s accomplice, and vice versa, two sides of the same worn coin—an agreement to perpetuate the status quo. What he holds against both right and left is their joint blocking the way to any real social advance. I am not sure whether Revel, like Shaw, believes in a theory of socialism, but at least during his short electoral career he was running on a Socialist ticket. Certainly he is a democrat and egalitarian. To him, plainly, right-left in France is a symbiosis mutually advantageous to both parties and deathly to human liberty. Or as de Gaulle is supposed to have said of Jean-Paul Sartre: “
Sartre, c’est aussi la France.
”

De Gaulle is France, Sartre is France, the CGT and the Communists are France. France, for Revel, is a suspended solution in which all these elements refuse either to precipitate or to dissolve. What Revel is fighting, single-handed, is “France,” which has become to him the arch-symbol of all those forces of inertia that the original Adam in him felt bound to contradict when he still thought their locus might be Shakespeare or the obscurantist jargon of the Sorbonne chapel of philosophy. He is somewhat more indulgent toward the young Maoists, Trotskyites, and Castroites because they are young and the objects of a judicial campaign of terror, backed up by riot squads. But for him they too are “France,” in the unreality of their perspectives, doctrinaire slogans, and practical failure to get anything done.

Sometimes one feels that Revel, as an infant, was nurtured in a debating school where the training consisted of being obliged to take the negative of such seemingly unassailable propositions as: The earth is round; Proust was a snob; Fresh air is good for you; Travel broadens the mind. And where daily exercise in the gymnasium meant standing on their heads maxims like “War is a continuation of politics by other means” (
Without Marx or Jesus
, “Foreign policy is an initiation of war by other means”).

This would not be such a bad school for educating not mere mental contortionists versed in paradox but free minds. There is always the possibility that the exact opposite of what you think (or think you think) may be true. At least it is worth trying on for size, and experiment will show that the converse of many dogmas, once stated, appear to be just as plausible as the original. Moreover, anything repeated a sufficient number of times has a natural tendency to upend itself, as though obeying some physical law of balance, like a Cartesian devil or a Mexican jumping bean. E.g., if I hear often enough “Poverty is no crime,” I feel an urge to reply “Poverty is a crime,” meaning that it is against the laws of humanity or that to be poor is to be already two-thirds of a criminal in the eyes of the police.

In reality few propositions are entirely true and many are lucky if they contain a grain of truth. Thus automatically to take the opposite of any received idea, say, that Proust was a snob or that the United States is the citadel of world reaction, is almost bound to disclose unexpected evidence to the contrary. The danger in such operations is to mistake those grains of truth newly brought to light for the whole truth and to fall into a reverse orthodoxy, which will not long have the merit of being your own private opinion or stubborn form of dissent but will soon be on “everybody’s” lips. Far from being free to perceive what is there, outside, you are suddenly the captive of your own heresy and the adherents you have gained for it, many of whom have drawn near to listen from self-interested motives or simple love of novelty.

I do not think Revel has altogether escaped this danger in
Without Marx or Jesus
. Less than in his earlier polemics. The reason is that previously he stood virtually alone, his back to the wall, with not many more “voices” in his favor than he found to vote for him in Neuilly in 1967. But here the ally he has embraced in the shape of the United States is likely to smother him with warm moist grateful kisses. Even before U.S. publication, you can already hear those smacks resounding from the pages of
Time
and
Newsweek
. And in the French press, surprisingly, there have been quite a few huzzas. Only on the ultra-right and the ultra-left has the book been savaged. The Communist press, though naturally critical of his un-Marxist approach, has been remarkably unvituperative, no doubt because Revel’s views, on some domestic issues, coincide with their own policy of parliamentary “opposition” and reprehension of extra-legal and guerrilla tactics. The fact that Revel is offering a happily distant, transatlantic alternative to the awful specter of helmeted local revolutionaries armed with Molotov cocktails and shrieking a Maoist or Castroite gospel must appeal to readers of
L’Humanité
as much as to readers of
Figaro
and
France-Soir
.

That is not Revel’s fault, and if his thesis is true, it does not matter who takes comfort from it. Besides, if the French middle classes relax in the assurance that the revolution can only take place in America, they may get a surprise. More curious, and for Revel perhaps more disquieting, is that the French reviews paid almost exclusive attention to the “positive” sections of the book, those dealing with the United States, and virtually ignored the “negative” sections, those dealing with France. Yet to my mind these contain some of his most splendid tirades, his highest comedy, and most acute observations: e.g., Pompidou rebounding from rough American reporters to deferential French journalists is as good as a play.

Up to now, the complaint about Revel’s pamphleteering has been that it is “negative.” “Why does he have to tear down?” and so on. He answered the judgment at length in the final section of
La Cabale des dévots
, where his defense rested on the common-sense argument, How can you expect me to be positive about a negative?—in that case the calamitous and self-satisfied state of French philosophy.

Of course his defense was right. The insistence on “constructive criticism” has no place in intellectual discussion. According to that notion, one could never “damn” a play, a picture, or a poem without putting in its place another play, picture, or poem, as though it were a question of an inventory and the withdrawal of one article from the common stock demanded immediate replenishment to maintain a constant level. A false equation is made with the necessities of practical life, where if I declare that the doctor treating a patient is a quack, I am under some slight obligation to try to find a more reliable man to speed to the bedside or the operating table. The idea that all doctors are quacks, true or not, is insupportable to a sick person but quite supportable in argument.

Without Marx or Jesus
, however, breaks with Revel’s critical habit by offering a positive model, the United States, to offset the otherwise gloomy picture he draws of mankind’s revolutionary perspectives. If it were not for the United States, he is at pains to show, they would be nil. No hope. But why, one might ask, is a revolution called for? Why not gradual evolution? It is true that the world situation appears so grim, that to the emotions only a revolution seems capable of altering it for the better; we hope for a revolution as desperate peoples in the past hoped for a miracle to save them when all other resources had run out—battalions of angels flying in from the sky, manna flowering in the desert. A revolution
is
a sort of miracle, a widening crack in the social crust that is finally perceived to be an earthquake, and, like a miracle, it is outside the laws of prediction, except from the point of view of hindsight.

Given the common desperation, Revel can be excused for foreseeing a revolution in the United States, since he cannot see one in the offing anywhere else. But to
argue
it is something different. At the risk of being destructive myself, I would say that his “revolution” is only a metaphor, a play on words. If he means that the United States is different from the stereotype of it in French thought and that some changes are taking place there whose repercussions are already being felt elsewhere (the Berkeley Free Speech uprising anticipating “May” in Paris by nearly four years), then he is not saying anything very revolutionary, except perhaps to French ears.

I agree that draft refusal, dropping out, Woodstock, the drug culture, the Panthers, Women’s Lib, the Yippies, concern about the environment, the back-to-Nature movement, open admissions to universities show that the United States is “ahead” of all its partners in the West, if that can be taken as a value-free term rather than a blanket endorsement, for we are also “ahead” in sophisticated weaponry. I agree too that all this diverse effervescence may add up to some kind of transformation already as alarming to most people over forty as a universal bomb threat.

Very likely, as Revel says, American traditions embodied in the Bill of Rights and an old history of civil disobedience going back to 1776 have favored these developments, although the very rootedness of those traditions or folkways could suggest the opposite of his conclusion, suggest, that is, that they are not very exportable. It seems to be easier to transplant Coca-Cola than hominy grits or habeas corpus. But in any case to propose that these changes are a revolution is to detonate images of the taking of the Bastille, the Carmagnole, Trees of Liberty, the storming of the Winter Palace, the shot-heard-round-the-world. The reader sometimes feels that he is poring over a rosy positive print of the negative that met the eyes of Attorney General Mitchell’s wife, Martha, when she looked out her Washington window and saw a mob of “the very liberal Communists”—the Mobilization marchers against the war in Vietnam—and thought she was in St. Petersburg in October 1917.

Revel is of course careful to explain that he does not mean what everybody else means by a revolution, that most of what we call revolutions were really aborted revolts, e.g., the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the Hungarian Revolution, which were either totally defeated or failed to achieve their ends and bogged down in tyranny. He believes that up to now there has been only one revolution—that which effectively took place in France, England, and the American colonies in the latter half of the eighteenth century (having originated in England in the seventeenth) and which, despite many setbacks, eventually replaced the old order by new democratic institutions.

One wonders, though, whether by his own strict criteria that protracted spasm was not also an aborted revolt, since many of its objectives have failed to this day to be realized, not only on a world-wide basis but in the countries where the whole thing started: The Rights of Man remain in large part on paper, like the Soviet Constitution, and equality is still a dream. So far as I can see, if one accepts Revel’s definitions, the only successful revolution, up to now, has been the Industrial Revolution. ...