When the left was in power

Mitterrand’s first seven-year term: major achievements of the left in power or end of collective hopes? Modernization policy or betrayal of the people? A look back at the 1980s, which completed the “second French revolution”.

It is a complex subject, both scientifically and politically, that Mathias Bernard, a historian specializing in contemporary political phenomena, studies. François Mitterrand’s first seven-year term constitutes an object of study marked by a double specificity. It prompts an increasing clearing on the part of historians, facilitated by the opening of archives, the “cooling” of issues and the renewal of themes. At the same time, it gives rise to a negative reading in part of the social science literature or activist works.

The decline of the working world

The 1980s seemed to mark the end of great collective hopes, replaced by a form of resignation mixed with individualism. At the crossroads of this double perception, the left’s experience of power from 1981 to 1986 has already been the subject of numerous works, including, in particular, a conference organized by the François Mitterrand Institute on 15- January 16, 1999. The author, relying on the press, the resources of theINA and the mastery of a large bibliography, offers an essay on France in the 1980s, embellished – this is one of the originalities of the work – with extracts from the texts of successful songs of the decade.

However, this decade does not constitute an isolate, as Mathias Bernard notes in his introduction. As early as 1988, the sociologist Henri Mendras had underlined that it was part of a “second French revolution”, which began in the 1960s and ended under the government of Laurent Fabius (1984-1986). This great change, which Jean-François Sirinelli calls the “decisive twenty”, results in multifaceted transformations of French society, which acquired most of its current features during this decade. Among them: mass unemployment, the installation of the National Front in the landscape, the shift towards globalization and an integrated European space, territorial ruptures.

Mathias Bernard underlines how the years 1981-1984 were central to these changes. Arriving on a program of social transformation, the left in power will finally have accompanied the developments that it originally wanted to thwart. Thus, François Mitterrand’s first seven-year term was the moment of agony for part of the French industrial fabric (p. 102-114): the Manufacture in Saint-Étienne, definitively closed in 1985, the Charbonnages de France, which manage from 1983 the end of French mining activity, the reduction of metallurgy (in Fos-sur-Mer or in Lorraine). The power of the left is reduced to supporting the decline of its sociological and identity heart, the working world.

This mourning, what is more, is theorized as a necessity. In 1984, the show “Long live the crisis!” », broadcast on Antenne 2, highlights the winners of economic changes, strategic audacity and managers presented as new heroes. More generally, the 1980s legitimized a discourse of modernization which denounced the “losers” (employees, companies in difficulty and, sometimes, the unemployed themselves) who would not be able to adapt to “new realities” (p. 119 -127). The alternation of 1986 confirmed this social, cultural and ideational change, notably by leading to the first privatizations and by advocating an uninhibited discourse on money.

Progress in individualism and identity issues

These economic transformations, Mathias Bernard shows, have multifaceted consequences on French society. The media universe has been turned upside down by the birth of private television channels (Canal+, M6, TF1), which are reshaping cultural consumption. Liberalization of the band FM also participates in this redefinition. Public television and radio, often austere and concerned with quality, is replaced by a media landscape marked by the promotion of success, consumption and easy money.

The cult of the news item, like the Grégory affair in 1984-1985, illustrates this change in the media landscape. Likewise, individualism reshapes the entire social body: as the author notes, the continued progression, during the 1980s, of suburban housing is one of its symbols.

Central point of the work, the historian underlines how the ebb of the workers’ movement, which offered a socio-economic grammar (the class struggle), opened the field to identity issues, after they took advantage of the vacuum created (pp. 238-239). The rise of the National Front, the re-emergence of the Vichy past, tensions over ethnocultural issues are all factors, which combine to erase the traditional struggle between labor and capital. This becomes all the more invisible as all collective structures (churches, parties, unions, associations) become anemic.

This weakening is partly masked by the apparent good health of humanitarian and charitable institutions (Téléthon, Enfoirés show, etc.).

Continuity and posterity

Mathias Bernard’s work, stimulating, alert and informed, calls for three complementary analyzes, which the author suggests throughout the book. First of these – the historian notes in the introduction – the “turning point” of the Mitterrand years must be put into perspective. Several works on French socialism, whether on the economy, social policies, municipalities or education, emphasize that the changes in P.S. in power after 1981 were partly already prepared by the 1970s. The socialist governmental experience of the 1980s is therefore not a rupture in itself: it crystallizes contradictions (liberalism or interventionism, relationship to Europe, ambivalence towards towards the working classes) which pre-existed the victory of François Mitterrand.

Second analysis: the electoral and political fortunes of the left have been largely confirmed since 1981. While it was in opposition from the beginning of the Fifth Republic until this date, it has governed the majority of the period since the election of François Mitterrand. A real decoupling has taken place between the political destiny of the left and its militant surface (members, unions, associations). Likewise, the weakening of some of its socio-economic demands has in no way called into question this electoral fortune.

Thirdly – ​​and this point is recurring in the book – the 1980s marked the replacement of collective hopes and beliefs by the cult of individual emancipation. The ever-increasing fragmentation of demands and aspirations has its origins in this. This individualization of the emancipatory idea probably constitutes one of the lasting turning points of the decade, of which current French society, like others, is fully the heir.