The Conservative Human Rights Revolution by Duranti Marco

Author:Duranti, Marco [Duranti, Marco]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-12-19T16:00:00+00:00

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Neomedieval Human Rights in the Shadow of Vichy

Age of Extremes, Age of Ambiguities

Europe’s twentieth century was an age of extremes, but it might also be called an age of ambiguities. As such, students of the period must beware of falling into the trap of nominalism, whereby too much significance is given to the names that individuals and movements used to describe themselves. This was above all the case for France, where games of political semantics reached their apotheosis. During the middle decades of the twentieth century, it was de rigueur for French conservatives to adopt the nomenclature of their opponents. As the London School of Economics political scientist Dorothy Pickles observed on the eve of the Second World War, “It is sufficient to say of a French political group that if its name contains the adjective ‘Left,’ to know immediately that it is either not Left at all, or that only a fraction of its members vote Left; a group labeled ‘Democratic’ is invariably Right, as (with one exception) are all groups labeled ‘Republican’; ‘Liberal’ equally invariably describes a Conservative, as does the term ‘Progressist.’ ” 1 As for the absence of the word “Conservative” from this lexicon of party labels, Pickles astutely noted, “Dislike of the name does not prevent the existence of the thing.” 2

Such a blurring of political languages was also in evidence on the German and Italian Far Right. Suffice to say, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) was no friend of socialist German workers. In Italy, the National Fascist Party (PNF) presented itself as an anti-capitalist revolutionary movement at the same time as it was violently repressing exponents of socialist revolution. Denunciations of capitalism had long been commonplace in right-wing rhetoric. Karl Marx in the The Communist Manifesto (1848) described the political program of counterrevolutionary aristocrats as “feudal socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty, and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core, but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.” 3

Following the Liberation of France, few were willing to openly declare themselves conservatives. The Center Right of the French electorate was represented in coalition governments by the Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP), a Christian democratic grouping of largely Catholic résistants , many of whom described themselves as progressives committed to social democracy, but who in practice behaved as social conservatives often siding with free-market conservatives over socialists on questions of economic policy. Though committed to parliamentary government, trade unionism, and the welfare state, the MRP was hostile to state interference in Catholic civil society, defended the rights of property owners, and abhored Marxism.

As the historian Martin Conway has pointed out, postwar democracy was characterized by “the supremacy of parliaments.” 4 At the same time, however, transnational countercurrents to this parliamentary supremacy in the national sphere emerged in the form of European unity movements founded by intellectuals who had made a career of attacking parliamentary democracy during the interwar years.

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