a centralized popular theatre. During the course of this campaign, a strange typo occurred in an article criticizing the still young Théâtre National Populaire. The Trocadéro, this argued, was suitable only for a company headquarters or a gala performance:
For regular performances, it is a distant mecropolis [sic!], inaccessible and devoid of attractions, in which echoes fall in silence and scatter in the void. The Théâtre Populaire can stop there on tour. But it should certainly not settle there. It would succumb to the place.73
But it did not actually succumb. It continued to live there the death of its idea, just as long as it could resurrect each new season its suicidal Werther. In order for it to rediscover more conquering ambitions, the Resistance had to revive, for a while, the people of Michelet.
2
The Cultural Historic Compromise
The platforms of the image
‘The platforms of the Common Programme are empty.’1 This phrase, readily repeated in certain circles, leaves more questions open than it intends. It is not so much astonishment at the self-assurance of those who believe that their absence is enough to create a desert. Rather the sentiment is that the demonstration has forgotten to ask what it is seeking to demonstrate – is this non-presence really a lack? Is it the rhetoric of intellectuals on the platform that makes programmes – common or otherwise – loved today? If certain places on the platform are no longer occupied, it is perhaps also that platforms themselves no longer occupy the same place. Alongside the effects of rhetorical control that play themselves out within the political class, are there not other paths by which programmes today get through to people – by a certain ability to manage and reactivate the images that walls, screens, newspapers and other surfaces of representation offer us each day, i.e. images of the world and of ourselves? Images of misery and well-being, of freedom and constraint, of rootedness in the past and dreams of the future. What may well be decisive today for programmes of the left to seduce people is less the presence on the platform of the great intellectual stars than the ability for reappropriation shown by all those images that were forged in the struggles and dreams opened by May ’68, and that have slowly invaded the whole fabric of the social imaginary which advertising manages, and which politicians are learning to manage, in proportion to these struggles and dreams losing their substance.
There are no great thinkers to praise the policies of the established left from the platform. But who was it who used to warn us that ‘there is more to life than politics’? The same Wolinski, formerly the great image-maker for May and gauchisme, who, now that the former theorist and strategist proclaims the emptiness of platforms of the left, we see daily illustrating the latest party line on the front page of L’Humanité? A counter-example, or a sign of a deeper phenomenon in relation to the gauchiste legacy? Perhaps a sign that the platforms that proclaim the death of Marxism – jealous as they are of the May legacy – have kept no more than words, the grand rhetoric of denunciation (and today of resentment), whilst the heroic or familial images of gauchisme passed silently over to the other side? And not always quite so silently. We’ve had to note, for example, how in the space of a few years Communist cinema has been able to reconstitute a whole political and cultural fabric, from 1936 to the struggles of today, via the Resistance and the Algerian war, from workers’ struggles to the wanderings of migrants, not to mention struggles over housing and feminism. Yet this new legend does not just signal the reprise of a historical legacy, or the new ability to illustrate a politics in terms of demonstrative fictions and images to be loved. It is a reconquest on the terrain of gauchiste practices and images. Even when Communist filmmakers present fragments of Communist history (La Question, L’Affiche rouge), it is first of all the breaks that gauchisme made in Communist history and legend that are plugged: opposition to the Algerian war, the terrain for the formation of an activist youth in opposition to the Party; 21 February, the anniversary of the execution of the Manouchian group,2 which at the time of the Vietnam war became a symbolic day for the far left to take up the internationalist tradition – and then a symbol, at the time of the ‘German Jews’ of 1968 and the ‘new popular resistance’, of the struggle against the social-chauvinist party of ‘Marchais STO’.3
Indeed, the way in which L’Affiche rouge4 returns this symbol to the PCF is exemplary. By refusing to make an heroic historical film, by having the actors ask the question ‘how should the Manouchian story be represented today?’, the film conducts a very precise operation: it takes the Manouchian story out of the contradictory history of the Communist movement in order to enrol it in the unanimous space of gauchiste culture: the Cartoucherie, a privileged place for gauchiste theatre, celebrations and actions. It is then the familial images of the gauchiste second age (popular memory, festival, fraternity, bikers . . .) that supersede the heroic images of the first age, and, filling the breach inscribed in these, return the Manouchian legend to the history of the party of Georges Marchais.
L’Affiche rouge is not a film that presents Communist images in place of gauchiste ones, nor a Communist discourse on gauchiste images, but rather a film whose discourse is made up of gauchiste images – more precisely, by the work of gauchiste images on other gauchiste images. An exemplary process: the images of life that fraternal gauchisme opposed both to the grey-on-grey of the old left and to the simplicity of images of heroic gauchisme are today used for the Communist reappropriation of the gauchiste legacy, to create a new love for the Communist legend. A very specific reappropriation, since it precisely allows politics to disappear in the family photo, lets partisan education become éducation sentimentale. The film’s message is not so much ‘We are the party of the fusillés’,5 as ‘We are the party of youth’. This ‘gauchiste’ reabsorption of politics into life finds its limiting expression in La Communion solennelle,6 in which the claim of the young left to represent the legacy of the workers and peasants is depicted in the immediate form of genetic transmission, the new left positivity presenting itself as a living sexual force.
Paradoxes of the new left culture: it is thanks to the cultural hegemony built up within the right’s political domination that the left has been able to propose the brand image of its renewal. But this cultural hegemony is far less an ability to create images than an ability to manage images produced elsewhere. It is the expansion of the gauchiste imaginary, its commonplace dissemination into the whole of society in proportion to the political decline of gauchisme, that has once again given the old left control over images. While the Giscardian state was bending its efforts to transform the terrain of gauchiste struggles into one of liberal reforms, and to use the imagination whose power had been proclaimed in 1968 in its study groups and research departments, those aspiring to power from the left found in the gauchiste imaginary – an imaginary levelled down, vulgarized, purged of its contradictions – the means for illustrating the new political love and hope. Not that the new Communist cineastes use gauchiste posters to sell their Communist merchandise. Cassenti’s fraternal romance, or Féret’s family novel, are not advertising tricks, but rather the point of anchorage of their own Communist belief. The new left fiction is not a fraudulent adoption of gauchiste images, but perhaps the only way possible today to handle and manage these images, control of which has escaped the gauchistes. The power of managing images is above all the power of legend, understood in its original sense: the power to put a caption under the images in which each person is summoned to recognize their desires and nostalgias. The power, in the end, of a simple signature in a corner of the image: the inscription ‘Long live the Communist Party’ in the condemned cell (L’Affiche rouge), the poster of Marx as a biker inviting young darlings to the Young Communist fête, which the camera negligently passes in Des Enfants gâtés7 as it pans over a construction site. This film perhaps gives the best representation of the new left image. Politics is not concealed in the family photo. But its operation has undergone an inversion, which was both sensed and misconstrued in an exemplary fashion by Le Monde’s film critic:
One may regret that such a vibrant and intelligent film, whose characters are so fraternal to us, becomes at times so heavily demonstrative. This is the straw that spoils these spoiled children. But it is only
