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Colonialism and Neocolonialism 58
train the other day: ‘Me, I don’t give a damn about Algeria, and I don’t like colonization
either. But it’s our heritage. And you have to hold on to your heritage, even if it doesn’t
pay.’
So these people are going to vote for the efficient man, for the man who must and can
solve all our problems. But they do not even know what they would like him to do.
Perhaps they are hoping for the most radical solution. Independence, for example.
They would be a little scandalized but, deep down, delighted that he was forcing their
hand: ‘Since everything that comes from him is sacred, independence, the very idea of
which used to seem a sacrilege to me, is the fairest and most French of solutions.’ Is there
not an exact resemblance between them and the people of the system: all, or nearly all,
deputies wanted peace and voted for war.
And I am beginning to wonder whether these Gaullist republicans are responsible for
the fallen Assembly which they detest.
On the streets you could hear the Biaggistes or Le Pen’s guys. They talked loudly, they
shouted: ‘French Algeria!’ But how many of us shouted: ‘Peace in Algeria’? Deputies are
fascinated by numbers: it is an odd habit of elected representatives.
You who criticize them today for having being unable either to make peace or win the
war, why did you not go and shout outside their windows: ‘Negotiate!’; why did you not
protest against the torture, against the summary judgements, the punitive expeditions, the
disappearances, the camps? Those who will vote for de Gaulle are disgusted by, and want
to escape from, their own paralysis, their own faint-heartedness. And furthermore, there
were, in the Assembly, men who wanted peace and said so out loud. If we had supported
them, all of us, instead of becoming entangled in our contradictions …
I also observe that the apolitical will vote for de Gaulle: the same people, perhaps, who
abstained at the last elections. Among them you find indifferent, middle-of-the-road
people, without passion, who just want peace and quiet. But there are other people who
you can’t think about without shame.
Following an article where I explained why I will be voting ‘no’, a woman reader
wrote to tell me she would be voting ‘yes’, although she appeared to agree with me on
most issues: ‘Yes means ups and downs, but life will go on; no means an adventure.’
That is the crime – not of the Fourth Republic, but of our middle classes for the last
150 years: there have been second-class citizens without hope, and for so long that they
think of themselves as such. They have so few rights, so little influence, they carry so
little weight in the world that political upheavals do not affect them.
My correspondent thinks she has nothing to gain from the collapse of the Republic, but
nothing to lose either. They will take away her civil liberties, they will whittle away her
union rights perhaps, they will leave her only the right to stay silent. What does it matter?
She is voting for dictatorship. That proves that she was already silent, that she has always
been silent or that no one listened to her. No one. Ever.
If millions today are indifferent towards the Referendum, if they do not care about the
respective powers of the President and the legislative body, it is our fault because we
have never managed to make them understand that they affected other people simply by
placing their vote in the ballot-box and that a citizen’s political activity is the most
complete affirmation of his or her liberty. It is also because they do not count and have
never counted for anything, and have made do with the life meted out to them as best