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 Contents
Introduction to the English-Language Edition
1
I.
Before the Election
7
2. After the Election
21
This edition first published by Verso 2008
©
Verso 2008
Translation
@
David Fernbach 2008
First published as
De quoi Sarkozy
edt-if
le
nom?
©
Nouvelles Editions Lignes, 2007
All rights reserved
3. Eight Points, to Start With
43
4. Only One World
53
5. Courage in these Circumstances
71
The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted
6. France's Transcendental: Petainism
77
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
7. The Incorruptible
87
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F OEG
USA: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.versobooks.com
8. Must the Communist Hypothesis
Be Abandoned?
97
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
9. The History of the Communist Hypothesis
and Its Present Moment
1SBN-13: 978-1-84467-309-4
105
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in the USA by Maple Vail
:
•
n
.
 Introduction to the English-Language Edition
Many of my friends abroad still have an image of France
drawn from the most glorious episodes of our political and
intellectual history: the great thinkers ofthe eighteenth-century
Enlightenment, the Revolution of 1792-94, the nineteenth-
century insurrections of the workers and common people, the
.July days of 1830 and the Commune of 1871; I could also
mention June 1848, the formation of the Popular Front in
1936 and the great contribution made to the International
Brigades in Spain, the Resistance, the social legislation of the
Liberation, the great philosophical and progressive movement
from the 1950s to the 70s, May 1968 and its consequences
. . . The result of all this is that when a fact of similar kind
(political, intellectual, or both) but with an unquestionably
reactionary character happens in France, these friends are
amazed and wonder what is going on. Each time I have to
remind them that France is also a deeply conservative
country, which responds to the revolutionary episodes in its
history with long sequences of black reaction, and that those
who have come to power in these painful sequences have
never lacked the support of numerous and well-established
 PREFACE
THE MEANING OF SARKOZY
intellectual cliques. There is a second history of France, longer
and more bound up with the structures of state than the
insurrectionary history written by the broad masses. We can
think ofthe Thermidoreans after 1794, shielding if not actually
practising a white terror that claimed a far greater number
ofvictims than the Terror ofthe great Jacobins; or the Restora-
tion after 1815, with the 'milliard' in compensation paid to
the emigres and the revenge of the privileged of all kinds; the
swindle that brought the Orleanist monarchy to power in
1830 with the slogan 'enrich yourselves' that became the
national hymn; the interminable reign of Napoleon III and
his bankers, which followed trom the revolution of February
1848 and the massacre of the Paris workers in June the same
year; the consensus around horrendous colonial expeditions,
in particular the conquest of Algeria; the repression of the
Commune by the Versaillais and their frenetic massacre; the
nationalist butchery of 1914-18; right after the Popular Front
we had Petain, after the red years of 1966-76 we had Giscard
d'Estaing. And each time, a whole court of service intellectuals
praising the re-establishment of order and grizzling over the
'horrors' of the revolutionaries. Eulogists of the restored
monarchy under Louis XVIII, lickspittles of the Second
Empire, Versaillais pen-pushers drunk on the corpses of
workers, high-spirited youngsters of the anti-Bolshevik
legions, Petainists and collaborators ...
It
should be no surprise, then, that in the wake of May
1968 and its consequences a band of impostors took the
stage under the bizarre signboard of 'new philosophy',
charged with presenting, yet again, the abominations of the
revolutionaries, extolling capitalism, parliamentary 'democ-
racy', the US Army and the West. This was just a continuation
ofthe great invariants of our history: outbreaks ofimpressive
popular hysteria, to be sure, but also rancid reactionary
obsessions.
I try to show here how the election of Sarkozy is a
concerrtrate of this second history of France, the history of
dark and ruthless conservatism. This is why I have called
its principle one of 'transcendental Petainism', giving it a
name with a bit of a historical echo. I also try to show how,
against this 'restoration in the restoration', it is necessary
to go back to the most general and essential principles, what
I call the'communist hypothesis', of which I offer an inter-
pretation divided into periods. These are long-term
perspectives, triggered by an episode that one might believe
is relatively unimportant.
Do I then have to despair of my fellow citizens?
As
we
know, carried away by the fearful vertigo oftheir total political
disorientation, the electorate chose a character from whom
they soon saw nothing good could be expected.
It
might well
be, then, that at the end of the day 'Sarkozy' will denote the
end ofthis gloomy and increasingly sinister reaction that began
in the 1980s and has not stopped laying waste to our country,
its substance as well as its intelligence. Let's hope so.
My enemies - and there are a good number of these -
afraid as they are that the hope will return that a different
world is possible than the one that they serve, have insinuated
that I am anti-Semitic: a trick they invented two or three
years ago and use against anyone who displeases them. I
am proud to be attacked by true professionals of this
insinuation;'
Clearly, when I criticize the policy of the state
I [Accusations of anti-Semitism on Badious part were made after the publication
of the texts in
Circonstancee
3 (Paris: Lignes Manifeste, 2005) (in English they are
collected together in
Polemics
(London: Verso, 2006). One of the most egregious
examples of this claim was made by Eric Marty in his book
Une querelle avecAlain
/latholl, philodophe
(Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2007).]
3
2
 THE MEANING OF SARKOZY
PREFACE
of Israel, which is the least of things, or when I show how
some of them, ignominiously perched on the piles of dead
of the Extermination, attempt to stick the name 'Jew' on
the fate of the West and its master, the United States, thus
stripping this word of its great revolutionary tradition and
prostituting it in a way that is not only detestable but actually
dangerous for those who claim it, I give these professionals
grist for their mill. I repeat here, however, for those of these
professionals whose language is English, that if I cross the
path of one of them, being as I am a champion of direct
action rather than legal process, they will receive the slap
due to a stupid slanderer.
As far as the present book goes, you'd be hard-pressed to
find anything on which to pin the infamous charge of anti-
Semitism. Not a mention of 'Jews', not so much as a passing
allusion? No problem!
It
takes more than a little difficulty
like this to deter those sycophantic professional informers
who'll always find something to pounce on (even if they have
to lie through their teeth). A certain character of admittedly
limited intelligence, Monsieur Assouline, remarked on his
blog - you're either modern or you're not - that I called
those Socialists who joined the Sarkozy government 'rats'
and christened Sarkozy himself the 'Rat Man'. Anyone with
even a modicum of education would immediately have
grasped that I am referring here (not without a rhetorical
subtlety they should surely commend) to the metaphor of
rats leaving a sinking ship, to the legend of the Pied Piper
who led the rats out of the city, and to Freud's celebrated
case of the Rat Man.
2
Does Monsieur Assouline have any
education? He knows well enough, at least, where he wants
to end up. Since the last war and the Nazis, he proclaims
(follow closely), no one has ever treated anyone at all as a
rat. On the other hand, Sarkozy has certain Jewish ancestors.
And so ... You see? OK? You really do see?
The oddest thing is that the leader of these media intel-
lectuals committed to Restoration, Bernard-Henri Levy,
should jump on the bandwagon without even citing his
inglorious source. Thus we read in
Le
Monde:
In a recent book,
The Meaning of Sarlcozy [De quoi Sarlcozy
edt-it
Ie
nom?],
Alain Badiou used his just struggle against
what he finds 'disgusting' to reintroduce into the political
lexicon those zoological metaphors ('rats', 'the Rat Man')
that Sartre unequivocally showed, in his preface to
[Fanon's]
The Wretched of the Earth,
always bear the mark
of Iascism.P
There we are! Pierre Vidal-Naquet, a man greatly missed,
already showed, with his immense knowledge, how Bernard-
Henri Levy was also a professional of howlers and igno-
rance. And Sartre, throughout his essential essay
The
Communi
Ad
and Peace,
written in 1953-54, referred to anti-
Communists as 'rats'. He certainly did so with far more
good humour than the way he himself was treated as a
'typing hyena', not by the fascists but by his Communist
allies. The same Sartre uttered the famous sentence that
'every anti-Communist is a swine'. So we see that, well after
the war, animals were still used on all sides ... I particularly
like the Chinese usage to denote two apparent enemies who
are really complicit with one another - as for Mao were
2 [Pierre Assouline is a writer and journalist who runs a popular blog called
La
Ripub!u/u£ Oe.J
LiIWd.]
,) 'De quoi Sine est-il le nom?', Bernard-Henri
Levy,
Le
Monoe,
21 July 2008.
4
5
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