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The Frogs Who Demand a King* 59
they could. They will vote ‘yes’ on 28 September: provided they get their meagre salary
in January 1959 as they did in January 1958, they will think that nobody has taken
anything away from them.
But their very modesty deceives them: their salaries will be affected; the war will
continue, prices will rise. Today, they are nothing more than those few thousand francs,
their objective reality; tomorrow, the franc will go down and they will be even less.
Out of indifference or impotence, all these apolitical citizens are voting for apoliticism,
as if it were a programme they wanted to impose. In voting ‘yes’, they take their attitude
to extremes, to the point of renouncing all their civil rights. They surrender the care of
state to the man who will do everything for them. That is them simplified: they remain a
spouse, son, employee, or billiards champion, but they will no longer be citizens. They
remained silent, they are shown a muzzle; they vote to have it put on as quickly as
possible: the advantage is they will no longer be able to speak.
If I look for the reasons for such paradoxical behaviour, I immediately discover one:
the objective impotence of the French collective has been deeply inscribed in each and
every one of us as a personal sense of powerlessness to alter the destiny of our country.
It is appropriate to recall here the survey carried out on the New Wave and the
responses which struck readers of L’Express: ‘I don’t have an effect on Nikita, I haven’t
got any influence over Ike, it’s not me who awards the Nobel Prize.’
In fact, when we were twenty, we too could have replied: ‘I don’t award the Nobel
Prize, I have no influence over Stalin.’ But we believed we had destinies on a human
scale. We did not affect Stalin, but we did not imagine then that Stalin could affect us.
There was, of course, the big issue: Germany. We already feared it might re-arm, but
that did not frighten us. Indeed, it seemed to us that it was up to us to prevent the future
Franco-German war – or win it. We did not feel that we were dependent on the whole
planet.
Bloc politics and the Cold War, as well as the extraordinary development of methods
of communication, mean that young French people are first of all planetary; they belong
to the ‘One World’ the Americans talk about. But for that very reason, France is
shrinking, its fragility is showing, and anyway – so it seems – History is being made
elsewhere.
What’s the use of trying to exercise one’s rights as a citizen in France, what’s the use
of voting, if France is merely an inert object whose movements and position are
determined by outside forces? The timidity, seriousness and application of these young
people are just the realization of their social powerlessness. They immerse themselves in
work, worries about work, family life. They are also passionate about technology: it is
their only hold on the world. They are not bothered about politics: if we were Russian,
perhaps, or Chinese …
Behind this precocious wisdom, which is not even resignation, one senses a sort of
anxiety. They live in freedom but without power in an apocalyptic world which the stock
of American bombs is amply sufficient to blow up, under a sky criss-crossed by sputniks.
Every three months the papers prophesy the next and last world war, listing the
consequences with which you are familiar.
This fear shows clearly in a young employee’s reply: ‘Happy? Where? Ah, in the
family! I can’t complain, I suppose – I’ve got my wife and the little girls. I mean, we