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The Frogs Who Demand a King* 53
We have been waging war for 19 years: the system does not originate in the supposed
vices of the 1946 Constitution, but in the lingering fascination of a nation which is
shedding its blood, wasting its time, losing its culture and riches to preserve former
conquests that, for a long time, have been costing more than they bring in.
Executive? Legislature? System? Regime? Mere words.
If there is a power crisis today, we must look for its causes deep within the ills that our
new masters do not wish to or cannot cure. Everyone knows what I am about to say, but
many do not want to know. For the sake of the faux-naïfs I shall repeat it.
I make no claim that History is fair: it was perhaps not fair that we faced the first
onslaught of the German army alone, or that the enemy occupied us for four years, or that
we were left chewing over our defeat while our allies were winning the war, or that we
were liberated by them, hailed as victors out of kindness and tolerated as a poor relation
among the Big Five.
In 1945, we thought that we were taking our fate back into our own hands: the USSR,
the USA and General de Gaulle broke the Resistance. The strikes of 1948 exhausted the
workers. We then discovered that we were a very old country, a society stratified from
top to bottom by the economic Malthusianism of the interwar period. Where were the
people? They did not exist any more: they had been compartmentalized into divergent
interest groups which disliked one another. Besides, everyone was against everyone else:
small, medium and large firms, retail and wholesale trade, the rural population and the
towns, as happens when the movement of History stops and living contradictions are
transformed into inert conflicts. Major industry accentuated its Malthusian tendencies, the
working class tore itself apart: highly skilled workers, heirs to the old anarchosyndicalism,
slowed down modernization of equipment as much as possible because they
feared above all that their skills would become redundant; unskilled workers, weary of
getting nowhere in the vicious circle of prices and salaries, on the contrary, saw in mass
production the only means of raising their standard of living. Trades unions and political
parties added to these antagonisms and hardened them; but the coup de grâce, once more,
was delivered from without, the Marshall Plan, and the ‘Prague Coup’ turned these
economic and social conflicts into political hatred. The left had had its day.
That left the Empire. Very rapidly it started to disintegrate. You did not have to be that
bright to realize, right from the first revolts, that we were witnessing the beginning of
what was to be the most significant event of the second half of the century: the
awakening of nationalism among the Afro-Asian peoples; or to understand that this
movement of emancipation would be unstoppable and irreversible. But we did not want
to see, and to begin with even the left needed a lot of persuading: the Empire was our
greatness.
If we forced the rebels to recognize the sovereignty we had flogged off to the
Americans, we could dream for a while that we had kept it.
It was not the Assembly that created the imbecilic verbosity which rots everything: it
was the situation. We were among the Big Five, but seven years after the debacle,
Germany was crushing us with its might. ‘Great’ became a word devoid of sense. In the
colonies, we got them to respect our lost sovereignty by sheer butchery. Sovereignty was
just a word. We affirmed France’s greatness everywhere, but we knew that our wars of
prestige outraged the world without striking it with terror. The atomic powers asked