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Colonialism and Neocolonialism 44
other men – will guarantee all his future actions, whatever they may be. Or rather we
must believe that his heroic past actions, whatever tomorrow’s circumstances, are the
ones which will be repeated, mysteriously adapted to the demands of the situation. It is
the eternal return of his past heroic exploits that we must await: all his defunct actions,
suddenly invading the present, will become sacred. This link which must unite us with
him – devotion, fidelity, honour, religious respect – has a name: it is the oath of fealty
which joins one person to another or, if you prefer, the bond of vassalage.
I am not claiming that this link is without human value: but precisely because these
relationships are laden with death and the past, overloaded with the sacred, they are the
very opposite of truly democratic relations, which consist of judging men by their actions
and not vice versa, of communicating via common endeavour, of sharing responsibilities,
of judging an action by its aim and its outcome. That is what the journalists present at the
press conference, and later the radio audience, sensed: the solitude of this man locked in
his grandeur prohibits him, in any case, from becoming the head of a republican state. Or,
what amounts to the same thing, it prohibits the State of which he would be the head from
remaining a republic. All those who, to a greater or lesser extent, have felt drawn recently
to the vertigo of catastrophe, who have taken a bitter pleasure in seeing France as a
destiny, and who dreamed of a Gaullist democracy, a little funereal but alive, all at once
understood what they were being offered, the only thing that they could be offered: this
dismal solitary grandeur. It is not by chance that the republican political forces, forgetting
their disagreements, have got together since Monday evening for a more effective fight; it
is not by chance that the government feels more solid by the hour, that the Métro, bus and
telephone strikes have been undeniably successful. France must have a strong
government, that is certain; the authority of the government, ruined by twelve years of
neglect and compromise, must be restored, but the best way of completing its ruin would
be to entrust it to one ‘strong man’ who would impose his rules on everybody: we must
restore this crumbling State, this maligned Republic, with the same men, with all the men
who are responsible for its semi-bankruptcy; we will only give it back its institutional
strength if, at the same time, we restore, against all our dreams of dead grandeur, the real
rights and liberties of the citizens.