Under New Management
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introduction to eric hazan Amid the intellectual murkiness of the European scene, a few bright flames are burning: as witness the work of Eric Hazan. Founder-director of Editions La Fabrique, since 1998 he has published a steady stream of radical and imagina- tive works, notably translations of dissident Israeli and Palestinian writings. Over the last six years he has produced four books of his own, among them L’Invention de Paris (2002), Chronique de la guerre civile (2004) and Changement de Propriétaire: La guerre civile continue (2007)—extracts from which are reproduced below. Hazan was born in Paris in 1936, and trained as a medical student. Briefly a young Communist militant, he broke with the Party in 1956—not over Hungary, but Algeria: a pcf that disavowed its Arab comrades, and expelled militants arrested for supporting the fln, was no longer the Party of the Resistance. Hazan joined a trickle of doctors in counter-flow to the mass exodus of French professionals from Algeria in 1962, working as village medic. In 1970 he helped form the Franco-Palestinian Medical Association and served as a volunteer doctor in a refugee camp outside Beirut. The shift to publishing came in 1983, when he took over his father’s art house, Editions Hazan; forced into a deal with Hachette 15 years later, he broke free to set up La Fabrique. A rare figure in France to speak out in trenchant terms—‘a duty as a Jew’—against the overwhelming official consensus on the Middle East, Hazan has eloquently analysed the ways in which traditional French antisemitism, inadmissable after the collaboration with Nazism, has been ‘delegated’ to the descendants of the colonized, while traditional French racism has found new expression in attacking the latter for a media-inflated judeophobia. In his work, the metaphor of a ‘world civil war’, its frontlines everywhere, also takes concrete form in the state coercion of the banlieue, the slums, the imperial warzones. His writings assemble collages—fragments of time, scenes from the street—in an attempt to recompose the totality which the operations of the liberal-democratic media work to disperse. Hazan has described his pro- gramme as putting Rancière’s notion of ‘the equality of anyone with anyone’ into practice. The views of a singular internationalist, informed by a broad historical culture. In These Great Times—11 eric hazan UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT Sarkozy’s First Hundred Days unday 6 may. The election results are in.1 It will soon be night. I cross the Place de la République on my bike. The grands boulevards are deserted. There is no one to be seen in Rue d’Enghien, where Sarkozy’s campaign headquarters are Slocated; the street is closed off by metal barriers and a thin line of police. But in front of Le Mauri 7, a café in the Faubourg Saint-Denis at the corner of Passage Brady, the local Kurds are discussing the Turkish foot- ball championships on the pavement. The line of riot police vans on Boulevard de Bonne Nouvelle stretches as far as Rue d’Hauteville. The only notable human presence on Boulevard Haussmann is that of two homeless people sleeping in front of the Chapelle Expiatoire, but when I reach Saint-Augustin there is suddenly a crowd. Sarkozy’s sup- porters are emerging from the Salle Gaveau and making their way to Place de la Concorde: hundreds of school students, and college kids in blue T-shirts, with balloons, flags, blue and green banners. Car horns are honking, people on the pavements applauding. The special issue of L’Express (headline: ‘Le Président’) is already in every hand—did they print an alternative cover or were they so sure of the result? The youth of the rich quarters, out to celebrate the triumph of the party of order and authority, are flooding into Boulevard Malesherbes. Place de la Concorde: technicians are busy installing the lighting and sound for the big concert. On the other side of the Seine, a thin police new left review 48 nov dec 2007 59 60 nlr 48 line is guarding the Palais Bourbon, and blocking the entrance to Boulevard Saint-Germain in a desultory fashion. Outside Socialist Party headquarters in Rue de Solférino, boys and girls from the Mouvement des Jeunes Socialistes are trying to put on a brave face—as white, clean and well brought-up as their counterparts on the other side. In a few weeks, all these healthy young people will be watching the same tennis championships at Roland-Garros. Not even a cat in the Latin Quarter, not even police vans, a sign of the decline that has struck this district, where so many seditious movements had their origin. At the junction of Boulevard Henri iv, completely deserted, police are blocking cars from access to the Place de la Bastille. There, perched on the plinth of the column, some girls have lit fireworks that cast a pleasant red glow over the square, along with clouds of smoke. The crowd is a mix of all kinds of costumes, skin colours, hairstyles, stickers and flags. Their anger is joyful and infectious. A blonde tourist is deciphering the inscription on the column, and stumbles over ‘qui combattirent’. Someone translates it for her: ‘who fought, fought’. A procession forms, aiming to head in the direction of Belleville, but all roads out of the square are blocked by helmeted crs with shields, trun- cheons and tear-gas guns. At the entrance to Boulevard Richard-Lenoir the first street signs are torn up, the first cobblestones thrown, then the first tear-gas grenades. The confrontation is getting serious, and I make my exit through a side street, Rue Jean Beausire, as nothing would be more stupid than to be hemmed in with my bike when the crs charge to clear the square. This evening one can still see the division of Paris between east and west that has marked all battles in the city since the days of June 1848. 7 May There was something odd about Sarkozy’s slogan: ‘Together, everything becomes possible’. Why the un-euphonious ‘becomes’, and not simply ‘everything is possible’? No doubt a turncoat from the left, someone like Jacques Attali or Max Gallo, had pointed out to the ump faithful that the formula had already been taken: it was the title of an article by Marceau 1 [In the May 2007 French presidential elections, Nicolas Sarkozy won 19 million votes to Ségolène Royal’s 16.8 million, on a turnout of 84 per cent.] hazan: France 61 Pivert published in Le Populaire on 27 May 1936, the last words of which were: ‘Everything is possible, and at full speed. We are at a moment that will certainly not return so quickly on the clock of history. So, as every- thing is possible, straight ahead, comrades!’ To quote Jaurès or Blum is one thing, but to take over the words of the revolutionary left would be something else again.2 In the collection of illustrious men that Sarkozy cites on all his appear- ances, there are scarcely any from the right—nor women either, in fact, except Joan of Arc. Careful to hymn the glorious sons of each region— Lamartine and St Bernard de Clairvaux in Burgundy, Mirabeau in Provence—in Metz Sarkozy found himself evoking Barrès, who cam- paigned in Lorraine under the slogan ‘Against the foreigners’. A brief mention, this, as his friends in the crif might well not have appreciated hearing him praise the leader of the anti-Dreyfusards.3 But no mention at all of Guizot, Thiers, Mac-Mahon, Tardieu or Laval, and the reason is clear. The very word ‘right’ only reappeared quite recently in the vocabu- lary of these politicians. After the Liberation, the leaders of the right were either in prison, in a few cases shot, or had fled abroad. I well remember how under the Fourth Republic there was only one party and leader that explicitly acknowledged being on the right. After the return of de Gaulle, his followers defended themselves against this very charge, in the face of all evidence, and there was even a sad little group of left Gaullists. It was only in the late 1970s, with the generation of Edouard Balladur and Raymond Barre, that the word ‘right’ could be uttered again without a blush, and ‘right-wing values’ publicly evoked. The high electoral turnout is being presented as a victory for repre- sentative democracy. According to François Fillon, who it is generally assumed will be the new prime minister, it is ‘the gate through which we can escape from the crisis of confidence that has cramped our country for such a long time’. For François Baroin, Minister of the Interior, ‘this impressive mobilization proves the vigour of our democracy and the republican values that we share’ (Le Monde, 8 May). Everyone pretends not to see that the turnout is due to the exceptional conjunction of two fears: on the one hand, fear of Sarkozy, who is only too clearly preparing 2 [Marceau Pivert (1895–1958): leader of the French Section of the Workers’ International (sfio), he attacked Blum’s capitulations in 1936. L’Humanité responded with an editorial: ‘No! Everything is not possible!’] 3 [crif: Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France.] 62 nlr 48 to ‘punish the poor’, and on the other, fear of the poor on the part of all those afraid of losing what they have—pensioners, shopkeepers, petty officials, farmers—and who, like the proverbial Gribouille, choose to plunge rather than carry on waiting for they don’t know what.