It took me some time, but I was finally able to digest Bernard-Henri Lévy’s review of Sarkozy’s book Témoignages. It has just been published under the title of Testimony, France in the Twenty-First Century (I wonder what they would have called it if Sarkozy had lost) even though it was published a year ago in France. I have a lot of respect for BHL even though I have, to say things crudely, a hate-love relationship with what his writings because I think that he isn’t always able to get himself out of the picture and to have the distance necessary to see the forest through the trees (I have the same problem). However, I take BHL seriously, because he is not only a serious thinker, but also a serious writer.
Thus, I took the time necessary to read, and reread his review of Sarkozy to see if I could learn anything new.
I liked BHL’s review in this case precisely because he injected himself into it, by explaining why he didn’t vote for a man, who had been a friend of his as he told Haaretz and chose instead to vote for Ségolène Royal, who had been ridiculed for her supposed stupidity and her lack of substance. I like BHL’s explanation because it explains to Americans, why people such as me, who aren’t even socialists or radical leftists, cannot let themselves seduce by Sarkozysm. Sugary excerpt:
I will explain elsewhere, in another way, when it is time. I will say, for example, how such and such a remark on national identity and how it must be preserved pushed me far away from him. Perhaps I will say, more precisely, that to be a Frenchman in the 21st century means to make a choice about certain major and seminal events, like Vichy, colonialism or May 1968. And I will look at the positions he took on these three questions and conclude that when he said that the Vichy government was not an integral participant in genocide, when he thundered that France should not be embarrassed by its "civilizing" work in Algeria, and when he vowed that if elected he would "liquidate the heritage of May 1968," which for 40 years has been a secret wound, a torment, sometimes the nightmare of the most radical reactionary right wing of this country, Nicolas Sarkozy cut himself off from men like me. […] There are the pages on repentance, for example. Or more exactly the pages about his love for France, which should be "proud of its past" and which we must love completely, without nuance, far from the "denigration" that the possible future president saw as a kind of illness. I personally have nothing against a little denigration. Frankly, I am not against the idea of political leaders and citizens speaking about the sadness, the pity, even the horror they feel when examining some of the blackest pages of their national history. In other words, I think that shame is quite useful in politics, and the idea of not feeling, as Emmanuel Levinas said, "accountable for" or even "hostage to" the crimes we did not commit, and even worse, not feeling accountable and responsible for those in which we or ours have had some part — I think this is exactly what Sartre (him again!) called a politics of "bastards." [….] I am only saying that there is in Sarkozy a relationship to memory that troubles and worries me. Men usually have a memory. It can be complex, contradictory, paradoxical, confused. But it is their own. It has a great deal to do with the basis of who they are and the identities they choose for themselves. Sarkozy is an identity pirate, a mercenary of others' memories. He claims all memories, meaning that in the end he just might not have any. He is our first president without a memory. He is the first of our presidents willing to listen to all ideas, because for him they are literally indistinguishable. If there is a man in France today who embodies (or claims to embody) the famous end of all ideologies, which I cannot quite bring myself to believe in, it is indeed Mr. Sarkozy, the sixth president of the Fifth Republic.
BHL states in that last paragraph what is precisely at the center at my strong opposition to Sarkozysm. I have denounced Pascal Bruckner for his tactical use of repentance to argue the unarguable and his advocacy of self-price to rehabilitate the superiority complex of those who believed not only that culture is everything and that there is a ranking of culture. I believe that politics is primarily about memory and History before being about action. They believe the contrary precisely because they believe that to act, one has to forget or to refuse to acknowledge what may cripple or delay action. Sarkozy and Bruckner, to use a term dear to Harvey Mansfield, are strong proponents of manliness when it comes to History. To Sarkozy and Bruckner, what matters is the will to power, strength, and actions. To them, shame, regrets, sadness, and fear are all emotions, which expose weaknesses and lead to paralysis, self-derogation, and self-hatred. In other words, memory is a burden because it leads to self-examination, which may lead to the acknowledgment of events, which are inexcusable and shameful. It is for that reason that so far in Sarkozysm the emphasis is on optimism and on the creation of the French dream to say to the French that as long as they are proud to be French, their actions will be rewarded.
Experience teaches that the past is never dead. one thing that Americans do better than the French is self-examination, They constantly look themselves in the mirror and to wonder whether their past no matter how recent fits with their idealism and this great experiment that is America. In France, the past has always trouble to pass from the frigid pages of history books to the collective memory because of the fear that France’s Gaullean grandeur can be handicapped by a look at a past, which has not reflected always that grandeur. That is the reason why Sarkozy has a no memory because his love for France and for everything else for that matter is conditional on perfectionism in the sense that the only emotion that he can feel over past’s failures and mistakes is shame for he cannot stand dirt and frailty. But I like to say that repentance, shame in front of History are red herrings smartly created by those whose sense of identity is so unmovable and inflexible that they would rather look outward and point fingers to argue that the world cannot ask them to be cleaner than it is.
However, the issue isn’t repentance or shame, but acknowledgment without sentimentalism, grandstanding, and condemnation. There isn’t such a thing as collective guilt and because I don’t believe that people are guilty for the mistakes of their ancestors for what matters is that they acknowledge them without guilt and without shame because acknowledgment, allowing their memory to accept that history can’t be clean because precisely of human frailty and imperfection. Anti-French and anti-American moralizers like to point to the dark spots of their history to argue that France and America are inherently bad countries and that their national identity is corrupted by their past failings. I, on the contrary, like to say precisely that those dark spots show that greatness is possible with imperfections and with failings. At the end, I always come back to the words of the great Jorge Semprún, there is no duty to remember for history is taught mostly those who weren’t even born when key events happened, but there is the duty to know, to acknowledge. Guilt is an inept, religious, and unacceptable concept, which cannot be tied to memory and to History. The primary responsibility of those who come after tragic events is to know, to accept them and to say “Nevermore!” instead of opposing, as Sarkozy and Bruckner do, patriotism and self-love to memory and to self-actualization.