Book. “Power is a mirror for the left, it attracts it as much as it frightens it. This ambivalence, this eternal back and forth punctuates its history.” In his latest work, The Challenge of Governing. The Left and Power from the Dreyfus Affair to the Present Day (Perrin, 416 pages, 23 euros), François Hollande defines, from the first two sentences, the terrible equation to which the left, born “in a revolutionary perspective”has been confronted since the 19th centurye century.
“Is the left’s vocation to protest, to contest, to overthrow a predatory and inhuman capitalism?” or “to take its part in correcting the damage of an order it fights?”, François Hollande pretends to wonder, as if echoing the New Popular Front (NFP), caught between the intransigence of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the Socialist Party’s (PS) attempts at compromise. For François Hollande, these questions are purely rhetorical. In his book, the former president answers them straight away, expressing his preference for social democracy, which has allowed the establishment of the “fundamentals” of our societies, such as labor law, secularism, public education or social protection. Radicalism must persist, but remain on the margins.
From the Tours Congress in 1920, which gave rise to the Socialist Party and the Communist Party, to the Popular Front, via the double seven-year term of François Mitterrand, and the “plural left” From Lionel Jospin to the last throes of the NFP, the former head of state goes back in time and sets about demonstrating, through history, the relevance of his thesis. That of a left that wins when its center of gravity is reformist rather than radical. From the beginning of the 20th centurye century, this duality is embodied through two figures, that of Jean Jaurès, who wished to govern in the name of the consolidation of the Republic, and the inflexible Jules Guesde, who advocated staying away “of a bourgeois government”.
The Epinay Congress, an example to follow
But the success of the left is also the combination of two antagonistic sides, which feed off each other. The author returns to the Popular Front and its social conquests, so relevant since the emergence of the NFP, governed by a Léon Blum who “marries both theses “, and succeeds in combining radicalism with “compromise ensuring stability and progress”. For François Hollande, it cannot be compared to the NFP, because, in 1936, society was swept away by “an irrepressible and inventive movement”, he wrote in reference to the social movements of the time. In addition, Léon Blum “convinces himself that he exercises power”while the “rebels”, “despite their proclamations”only wish “the acceleration of the presidential calendar”.
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