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Colonialism and Neocolonialism 60
don’t have the right to complain because you see so many people who are so much worse
off. But honestly, when I think about the future, and what they’ve got in store for us, I
can tell you I’m not happy. Every night, before going to bed, my wife looks out of the
window in case any sputniks pass by. When she sees that it’s not going to happen that
night, she calms down and manages to get to sleep.’
Since Hiroshima, we have been threatened, angered and worried the whole time. I
imagine that in every mind there is a scar which is nothing less than terror at rest. Many
people today could repeat Hobbes’s words of three centuries ago: ‘The one and only
passion of my life has been fear.’
Fear and impotence, fear because of impotence, impotence because of fear, everything
leads us, in this Referendum, to opt for impotence and fear. Without that little cerebral
scar caused by numerous different traumas, blackmailing us with the paras – the basic
argument of Gaullist propaganda, and even, if I may say so, the only argument – would
not have had so much success. We would have been ashamed, when I was 30, of giving
in to these drunkard’s threats. Do not get me wrong: we were not braver. Simply fresher.
Less damaged. First-timers’ fear, so to speak.
The young people of today have already been tricked with the Red Army, the bomb,
flying saucers, Martians, and now, finally, with the military coup of the paras. No matter,
modesty has its advantages: those who vote ‘yes’ on Sunday will be shamelessly
demonstrating that they are scared stiff, offering to the Gentle Lord their love and faith in
exchange for his succour and protection. At the same time as acknowledging their
impotence, they elevate his powers to the absolute. He is the Great Efficient One. We
should no longer be surprised by the ‘yes’ on the walls, the slightly sanctimonious
swooning fits: to accept, for love of the Prince, the Constitution he is granting us and
which muzzles us, is to give up once and for all the control of the executive by the
legislature and, more seriously, of action by reason.
These activists of impotence are counting on the Prince to solve the problems they will
not even want to formulate for themselves, to take for them the decisions they are
avoiding, to overcome the contradictions paralysing them. They are giving him free rein
because it is he. The Prince’s act, seen in this way, again becomes the unique, the
ineffable and the irrational. Let us go further: it is the incommunicable via a reciprocal
breakdown of communications.
Anyone who declares today that ‘de Gaulle is the only one who …’ is not saying
anything sensible: we are no longer dealing with statements of facts such as popularity
which is in a way measurable, but with a unique and incomparable quality which
separates de Gaulle from our world. Sick and tired of the ineffectual, our apolitical
republicans are saying ‘yes’ to the irrational, to the sacred and by the same token saying
‘no’ to equality.
If in the human species there exists a man who possesses wisdom that only he can
have, if this wisdom gives him the right to determine our destinies, even if he were a
good father, and if his acts are always valid and good for the sole reason that they express
his essence, then the human species will disintegrate in a chain reaction: no human beings
any longer; just a superman and animals.
De Gaulle is the protector of the planetary individual – I mean the French people – he
represents for them the living incarnation of our frontiers, he surrounds them and protects