Word: lefts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...idealism of the Enlightenment, promising liberty and equality, it soon deteriorated into a bloodbath that led to a dictatorship. Ever since, lurching wildly through two empires, two royal restorations and five republics, democratic France has tried to bridge the contradictions posed by its brutal beginning. Even today, when the left-right dialectic of French politics has softened under a socialist government leaning toward the center, the bicentennial has abraded old sores...
...unreconstructed left wants an unapologetic bicentennial honoring the nation's radical roots. "France is still a country of class struggle," wrote historian Claude Mazauric in the Communist Party newspaper L'Humanite. "The message of 1789 . . . is to build a society unconstrained by multinational capitalism." SOS-Racisme, a civil rights group, for example, will celebrate with a rally for Toussaint L'Ouverture, a former slave who led an 18th century Haitian rebellion against French colonialism. A group of prominent Parisian socialists is agitating to rename part of the Rue St.-Honore after Robespierre. "All revolutions have excesses," explains former Health Minister...
Furet views contemporary France as a "republic of the center" in which a consensus has emerged in favor of market economics combined with broad social services. "Left-right rhetoric today does not correspond to reality," he says. "France has buried its civil war." Three key changes explain why: the Fifth Republic finally established a strong, stabilizing presidency; the appeal of the Communist Party has withered; and the old antagonism between the Roman Catholic church and state has eased. "The left is in power precisely because it renounced its revolutionary culture," he says...
...dissenting voices on both the right and the left have had little effect on the majority of 1789 commemorations. Celebrations large and small, local and national, will attract record numbers of tourists to France. If these do not mark a true festival of reconciliation, the French can still take pride in the passion they have for their history. In Lyons, Jacques Tournier, the descendant of a water carrier who was guillotined in 1793, recalls that his grandmother refused to walk past the place in the market where the execution machine stood. "Now I too avoid that spot out of respect...
...Benton left New York for good in 1935, returning to Missouri. By then the regionalist movement had formed around his "heroic" pastoral vision, and he felt obliged to repudiate the city, whose art world was, he announced, a veritable Sodom of fanatics like Stieglitz and "precious fairies" who "wear women's underwear." Yet an odd thing about regionalism, as Adams shows in amusing detail, is that it was the only art movement ever launched by a mass- circulation magazine. Regionalism's promoter was a small-time Kansas-born art dealer named Maynard Walker, who sensed that the resentments of America...