Politics In France: Phantom and Charade

Politics in France has always been conducted as a branch of the drama: that was one reason Marx found it so rich a subject for historical narrative. Writing about the French Revolution, he remarked upon the regularity with which the revolutionists, to give themselves an aura of historic legitimacy, employed the imagery of the Roman Republic. If he were alive today and writing about the French events of this past spring, he might be remarking that, as new possibilities emerged under old masks ...