Left and Right: Passages from Marcel Gauchet 1996

Here are key passages from:

Gauchet, Marcel. 1996. Right and Left. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Chapter 7 in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past 1, edited by Pierre Nora. Columbia University Press: 241–300.

The compendium is an appendix to “Libertarians Need to Get Real about Politics,” by Daniel Klein and Zachary Yost, Fusion, June 6, 2024. Link

The boldface is added:

[Regarding] our favorite political categories… [the French Revolution] was not so much a beginning as a false start. (247)

[After 1900:] [T]he contrast with the Ancien Régime faded and it became increasingly apparent that the crux of the conflict was the organization of society… (296)

In this connection the central fact was of course the emergence and growing power of the Socialists… [I]ts arrival was the crucial new factor that changed the rules of the political game. It was in relation to this development that other changes took on their full meaning. (258)

Things changed about 1900… Right and left would soon establish themselves as the terms for describing the two Frances that clashed so passionately… The change was already apparent in the 1902 elections, which saw the victory of none other than the Bloc des Gauches… From now on, no matter what was happening internally in terms of relations among the various constituents of right and left, the competition for votes would be played as a contest between right and left, for this was the language of the voters even more than their representatives, hence the language the candidates were obliged to speak. (257)

Clearly, the appropriation of the terms right and left by the public went hand in hand with dissatisfaction with the way in which the words had been used… The terms were not simply transferred or extended from one domain to another but redefined. (259)

Perhaps the clearest sign of the change is the shift in attitude on the right toward the term right, which was easily accepted through the 1890s only to be rejected, for the most part, after 1900. Not that the right had changed, only the sense and scope of the denomination. It caused no difficulty as long as it referred only to a location in parliament. (266)

There is a phrase from the 1890s that can be credited with a definite role in helping the new system to establish itself: ‘no enemy on the left.’ This was the slogan of young reformers from the Radical group who joined forces in 1894–95 to push for an alliance with the Socialists. (260)

[W]e have here…the key to the asymmetry in the attitudes of right and left toward the existence of the right-left division. Clearly the division was promoted by the left, while the right, which had little use for it, tended to deny its existence or refuse to acknowledge it. (266)

For there to be a left, there must be a right. (284)

[W]hat happened with the Communists [after 1936] was the same thing that had happened with the Socialists before 1914: protest led to integration. The vehement insistence on separation ultimately reinforced the need for unity. (267)

[After 1936:] Once again the left had the initiative in this process. It would be artificial to proceed by symmetry with the right. It was on the left that the division between right and left was affirmed, underscored, and dramatized… Under pressure the right set itself up as the party of resistance. Its reluctance even to call itself “the right” concealed an even stronger distaste for the antagonism… Significantly, the right’s campaign rhetoric was far more likely to denounce the left than to assert its own identity as right (or even simply to call itself by that name). Rather than promote itself, the right preferred to blacken the name of the opposition and to forecast disaster ‘if the lefts should triumph.’ (272)

In short, while the left was at least mythically one, the right was in practice divided. This derives in large part from the contrast between a symbolism of implicit unity and an irreducibly plural identity. (278)