The shock of the...something or other

For those who find talk of great art (see previous post) fusty and old-fashioned, here is a statement from Willow Smith:

"That’s what art is, shocking people. Sometimes shocking yourself."

Yeah, down with that. Totally.

Quote of the day

George Eliot, Middlemarch, ch. LXI:

"There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men."

Peasants and patriotism

It is sometimes useful to distinguish nationalism from patriotism.  Nationalism often carries overtones of aggression, exclusivity, and/or xenophobia that patriotism doesn't.  A 1971 article by Jacques Godechot embodies the distinction in its title: "Nation, patrie, nationalisme et patriotisme en France au XVIIIe siècle."  

Godechot is cited by Rogers Brubaker in Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (1992) for the argument that French nationalism, as opposed to patriotism, emerged only in 1792 with the revolutionary wars.  Before that, "nationalism existed neither as a 'blind and exclusive preference for all that belongs to the nation' nor as a 'demand in favor of subject nationalities.'" [1]  According to Godechot, "it is...absurd to speak of French nationalism during the first years of the Revolution; patriotism is an entirely different thing." [2]

Patriotism was certainly in evidence long before the Revolution.  I've lately been dipping into Jay Smith's 2011 book on 'the beast of the Gévaudan,' a notorious predatory animal (or animals) that ravaged a remote part of south-central France in the mid-1760s.[3]  In two separate episodes, two people -- a shepherd boy and a middle-aged woman -- stood up to the beast when it attacked rather than running away, thereby becoming not only local but national heroes.  The king, Louis XV, rewarded them monetarily, and the boy, theretofore illiterate, was given an education at state expense and went on to a successful military career (abbreviated prematurely by his death in 1785). 

Smith writes:

Their feats [i.e., the feats of the boy and the woman] were folded into a potent cultural initiative evident in many corners of French public life in the 1760s.  In the wake of a disheartening war [i.e., the Seven Years' War], many writers -- government propagandists, historians, educators, moralists, journalists, novelists, and pamphleteers -- worked to boost national morale and encourage new sentiments of national pride.  Their project grew out of the hardening conviction that even "subaltern heroes," or persons of inferior status, could rise to the level of patriotic paragon, and it reflected the belief that a French identity based on proud sentiments of honor should inspire "patriotic enthusiasm" throughout the "mass of the nation." [4]       

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Notes

1. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, p.8, quoting Godechot, "Nation, patrie..." in Annales historiques de la Révolution française v. 206 (1971).

2. Godechot, "Nation, patrie...", p.498, as quoted in Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, p.193 n.28. 

3. Jay M. Smith, Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast (2011).

4. Ibid., p.160 (endnote omitted).

A certain magazine in 1846 on slavery

W.L. Burn, The Age of Equipoise (Norton pb., 1965), pp.69-70 (endnotes omitted):

The entrenched humanitarians of an older generation might deplore, as Lord Denman did in 1848, the fact that public opinion on the subject of slavery had suffered "a lamentable and disgraceful change".  They might note as evidence of a narrowing of sympathy the remark of the Economist of July 25, 1846, that "the duty of England is to its own subjects, not to the natives of Africa or the slaves of the Brazils" and its yet more forthright assertion on February 26th that the slave trade was "the only practical mode which has yet been discovered by which a communication can be opened and maintained between Africa and the civilized world".

Context: Parliament abolished the slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery everywhere in the Empire in 1833.  The issue here, as Burn notes, was the future of the West Africa Squadron, which (per Wiki), "[b]etween 1808 and 1860, ... seized approximately 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans who were aboard."

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ETA: Off-topic but not perhaps enough for a separate post so I'll stick it here. I was at the Boston Review site just now and on their "most read" list there's a piece by James Galbraith from 2003 arguing the JFK-had-ordered-a-withdrawal-from-Vietnam thesis.  I didn't take the time to read it, just scrolled through, but was interested given the persistent harping on this point by a particular Crooked Timber commenter who doesn't seem to be posting there anymore. Call me a snob or something, but a lengthy piece by James Galbraith makes me take notice a bit more than a pseudonymous blog commenter does. Not expressing a view on the substance.   

Adam Smith on Trump

"The rich man glories in his riches, because he feels that they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world.... At the thought of this, his heart seems to swell and dilate itself within him, and he is fonder of his wealth, upon this account, than for all the other advantages it procures him."

-- Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Clarendon Press), pp.50-51, as quoted in Nicholas Xenos, Scarcity and Modernity (Routledge, 1989), p.15     

Trump/Reagan

Paul Campos (here):

The French revolution’s slogan was “liberty, equality, fraternity.” The Reagan revolution’s guiding principles have been “stupidity, celebrity, plutocracy” – and Trump is the ultimate example of all three.

Whether this is exactly right might be debatable, but it's snappy and, as they say, close enough for jazz (do they still say that?).

Quote of the day

I was taking another look recently at a 1994 essay by Sankaran Krishna[*] that I cited in my diss. (some years ago).  This passage strikes me as a nice summary of at least one aspect of Nehru's worldview: 

Despite his firm belief in the timeless existence of a spiritual and civilizational entity called "India," Jawaharlal Nehru nevertheless felt compelled to begin his appropriately titled Discovery of India with a solid and physicalistic description of her "natural" frontiers.  Nehru's imaginative geography depicted impassable mountain ranges, vast deserts, and deep oceans that produced a "natural" cradle for what became India.  Anxiety regarding the physical boundaries of the nation gets inscribed early in Nehru's Autobiography.  The narrative script that runs through that definitive work in imagining India clearly traces her downfall to porous frontiers and, more importantly, to an unfortunate timing by which disunited and fragmenting India encountered the cresting and united civilization of the British.  The encounter not only produced colonial rule but also with it, Nehru argued, the sources of India's eventual redemption: modernity, science, the rational spirit, and, most importantly, national unity.

Notice the tension between, on the one hand, the reference to "impassable" mountains and "vast" deserts and, on the other hand, the reference to "porous frontiers."  The mountain ranges clearly weren't impassable enough, nor the deserts vast enough, to prevent multiple conquests of the subcontinent.

The idea of 'natural frontiers' has a long and somewhat checkered history.  Although natural features of the landscape do play some role in how the territorial boundaries of states have evolved, that role I think is a secondary or even tertiary one -- that is, I incline to the view that it's secondary in terms of boundaries' actual on-the-ground history, as distinguished from the often larger role 'natural frontiers' play in the legitimating myths of some nation-states.[**] 
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*Sankaran Krishna, "Cartographic Anxiety: Mapping the Body Politic in India," orig. published in Alternatives v.19 n.4 (Fall 1994), reprinted in Challenging Boundaries, ed. M. Shapiro and H. Alker (U. of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 193-214.  The quotation is from p.195 (endnotes omitted).

**The relevant literature is fairly extensive and I won't go into it here (though I'm probably willing to do so in the comments if someone wants).

Quote of the day (division of bad predictions)

"Some Hindus dream of going back to the Vedas, some Muslims dream of an Islamic theocracy.  Idle fancies, for there is no going back to the past.... There is only one-way traffic in Time."

-- Nehru in The Discovery of India, as quoted in Walzer, The Paradox of Liberation, p.25 

An interview with Dukakis

Slate has an interview with Dukakis (h/t).  He criticizes HRC strongly on Syria and Libya and then proceeds to say he is supporting her for the nomination ("views change," he says).  Dukakis also has things to say about Scalia, who was a law school classmate of his.  And on NATO, Dukakis says:

I don’t understand why we are expanding NATO, do you? What the hell is this? NATO was designed to stop Russia or the Soviet Union from invading Western Europe. That is not going to happen for the next 300 years. 

Quote of the day

"The style is extremely graceful, but its literary merits go with a refusal to use the more ponderous devices of footnote and reference which, like metal spikes in mountain-climbing, may be inelegant but do help one over the steep places."

-- Bernard Williams, review (in Encounter, 1960) of Stuart Hampshire's Thought and Action, reprinted in Williams, Essays and Reviews 1959-2002 (p.11).

The legacy of Brown

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education marked its 60th anniversary in May 2014.  A unanimous opinion of the Warren Court, Brown prohibited official (i.e., de jure) segregation in the public schools and rejected the doctrine of 'separate but equal'.  "Separate educational facilities," Chief Justice Warren wrote, "are inherently unequal."  He explained that "[t]o separate them [i.e., African-American students] from others of similar age...solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone."  In a follow-up opinion a year later, the Court noted that implementation of its decision would involve a "period of transition"; it ordered states to "make a prompt and reasonable start toward full compliance" with its ruling and directed the lower courts to "enter such orders and decrees...as are necessary...to admit to public schools on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed the parties to these cases."  

While the practical impact of Brown, which took time to be felt fully (see below), was in some respects significant, the "symbolic quality of the decision," as Yale Kamisar observed in 1969, "was immeasurable," or at any rate substantial.  Thurgood Marshall (later, of course, a Supreme Court justice) was the main lawyer for the successful plaintiffs, and the cases consolidated in the Brown decision were the culmination of a long litigation campaign by the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.   

Writing in The Atlantic around the time of the 60th anniversary, Ronald Brownstein described Brown's "core mission" as "unfinished" and went on to observe: "...racial and economic isolation remains daunting: One recent study found that three-fourths of African-Americans and two-thirds of Hispanics attend schools where a majority of the students qualify as low-income."  Brownstein also noted that the "increasing diversity and shrinking white share of America's youth population" makes more urgent than ever Brown's "broader goal of ensuring all young people the opportunity to develop their talents."

How much and in what ways did the Brown decision matter and, more broadly, how much did the courts in general contribute to the civil rights movement in the U.S.? On the one hand, the prohibition of de jure segregation in the schools was important both symbolically, as already mentioned, and because it did lead, first in the border states and then eventually in the deep South (after years of 'massive resistance' and other forms of obstruction), to some school integration.  In 1954, 'dual' (i.e. segregated) school systems were mandated by statute in eleven southern states and six other states, as well as the District of Columbia.  The situation in the border states began to change relatively quickly after Brown, but the decision did not have any substantial effect in the deep South until the 1970s, when, as James Patterson (author of a 2001 book about Brown) notes, the decision finally was enforced.  Some cities and localities have been success stories of integration -- Raleigh, N.C., to mention one, as discussed in Gerald Grant's 2009 book Hope and Despair in the American City [link]. 

If that's the glass-half-full side of the story, the glass-half-empty side is that there is overall still a great deal of both economic and racial segregation in U.S. public schools -- there's more segregation now in schools in the North and West than there was 30 years ago.  The Supreme Court had a chance to help reverse this trend in 1974 by allowing court-ordered cross-district (urban/suburban) busing in cases of de facto (residential) segregation, but instead a 5-4 majority of the Burger Court went the other way; the case was Milliken v. Bradley.  Voluntary urban/suburban integration programs -- which typically do not involve an actual merger of urban and suburban systems, as occurred in Raleigh, but instead move relatively small numbers of students across district lines -- are not an adequate substitute for larger-scale court-ordered programs, but Milliken basically precluded those.  Today, according to this piece that aired last month on the PBS NewsHour, there are only eight voluntary urban-suburban 'transfer' programs in the country, involving all together a mere 40,000 students, and almost half of those are in Hartford, Ct.  The same piece noted that the number of 'intensely segregated' (i.e., more than 90 percent minority) schools in Rochester, N.Y., has increased fivefold since 1989, and Rochester has one of the voluntary urban-suburban programs.

There is by now a large literature on Brown and on the broader question of the courts and social change, most of which I haven't read (I've listed a few relevant titles at the end of this post, but this list is only the tip of the iceberg).  With that said, Mark Tushnet's judgment on the impact of Brown, and of civil rights litigation more generally, seems reasonable, though no judgment here will command universal agreement.  In Red, White, and Blue: A Critical Analysis of Constitutional Law (1988), p.132, Tushnet wrote:

Brown galvanized black communities not so much because schools were desegregated -- except in the border states substantial [de jure] segregation continued for more than a decade after Brown -- but because it showed that one branch of the national government was on their side. Two years later the Montgomery bus boycott was the first episode in the development of the modern civil rights movement, whose sit-ins and marches prodded Congress to enact important civil rights acts in 1964, 1965, and 1968. The [Supreme] Court's response to the movement was hesitant and indirect. It never ruled that sit-ins were protected by the Constitution, but it did allow demonstrators to invoke the powers of the federal courts to limit the worst sort of harassment, and it upheld innovative efforts by the executive branch to convict white terrorists under old statutes.  Overall the courts played a distinctly subordinate role in the post-1960 struggle for civil rights.  It seems fair to wonder whether the pattern of race relations in 1970 or 1980 would have been dramatically different had blacks been forced to use only political methods.

Kamisar in 1969 emphasized more strongly Brown's "galvanizing" effect, arguing among other things that it contributed to the subsequent enactment of civil rights legislation and that it sped up or "perhaps even precipitated" the Warren Court's "revolution" in criminal procedure ("The School Desegregation Cases in Retrospect," in the Chelsea House volume listed below, p.xxiv).  Probably the only certain statement is that the legacy of Brown will continue to be debated.  
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References and further reading
Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize
Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights
Gerald Grant, Hope and Despair in the American City
F. Harris and R. Lieberman, "Racial Inequality after Racism," Foreign Affairs (March/April 2015)
Richard Kluger, Simple Justice
Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., All Deliberate Speed 
James T. Patterson, "The Troubled Legacy of Brown v. Board" (pdf)
Gerald Rosenberg, The Hollow Hope
James Ryan, Five Miles Away, A World Apart
Mark Tushnet, Red, White, and Blue 
 
Argument: The Oral Argument Before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1952-55, vol. 1 of the series Oral Arguments Before the Supreme Court (N.Y.: Chelsea House, 1970; paperback reprint, 1983), ed. Leon Friedman, with introductions by Kenneth Clark and Yale Kamisar.

[added later] R. Straus and S. Lemieux, "The Two Browns," New Political Science v.38 (2016) 

The "subjective impact" of inequality

In discussing post-1949 China in her classic States and Social Revolutions (1979), T. Skocpol quotes (on p.274) a passage from a 1975 article by Martin K. Whyte on how post-revolutionary China addressed the issue of inequality.  The Chinese regime, according to Whyte, aimed not so much to eliminate income and other inequalities as to "mute [their] consequences."  In this 40-year-old article, Whyte wrote:

People in high positions in China are viewed as entitled to certain kinds of differential rewards and authority, but at the same time flaunting authority or engaging in conspicuous consumption is tabooed. There is thus a concerted effort to blunt the subjective impact which existing inequalities might have on the initiative and dedication of the have-nots in whose name the revolution was fought.

The notion of the subjective impact of inequalities clearly relates to inequality's tendency, in some cases, to undermine the social bases of self-respect (as discussed in the comment thread attached to this post).  My impression is that conspicuous consumption is no longer especially discouraged in China; some might consider that one of the acceptable prices to pay for having escaped the more destructive aspects of Maoism, but it's interesting that, 40 years ago at any rate, Chinese policy was apparently very conscious of what Whyte labeled the subjective impact of inequality.  

Though Skocpol thought China was different from post-revolutionary France and Russia in this respect, I'm not so sure.  The addressing of pretty much everyone as "citizen" after 1789, to take one example, might have been one way in which the new French republic tried to, quoting Whyte in this different context, "mute the consequences" of the inequalities that remained after the Revolution. Just a stray thought...

"Obscure uprisings"

I'm starting to read Jonathan Sperber's Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (2013).  This passage appears in the Introduction:

Marx's life, his systems of thought, his political strivings and aspirations, belonged primarily to the nineteenth century, a period of human history that occupies a strange place in relation to the present: neither evidently distant and alien, like the Middle Ages, nor still within living memory as, for instance, the world of the age of total war, or communist regimes of the Eastern bloc in the years 1945-89.  Every once in a  while the nineteenth century suddenly emerges into the present, with an eerie clarity and familiarity.  A prime example are [sic] the revolutions of 1848, whose rapid spread from country to country within a few months was a central political event of the nineteenth century, but since then have been known only to historical specialists.  All at once, these obscure uprisings seemed current and familiar during the fall of 1989, as revolutions moved through communist Eastern Europe, or in the winter of 2011 as they raced through the Arab world.  Much the same can be said about the relationship of Marx's life and thought to the present: there are moments of familiarity, but more often than not, I am struck by the differences....

Would it be nitpicking to point out that if the 1848 revolutions were indeed "obscure uprisings" known only to specialists they really wouldn't have been able to seem "current and familiar" in 1989 and 2011?  What Sperber intends to say here is clear enough, but he's not saying it particularly well.  A copy editor probably could have fixed this in about fifteen or twenty minutes; however, the number of publishers using good copy editors seems small.
 
In fairness to Sperber, I have about 550 pages to go, and a preliminary glance through the book suggested that the overall quality of the writing is high.  It remains to be seen whether my preliminary judgment will be borne out. 

Quote of the day: Hoffmann on Kissinger

From the late Stanley Hoffmann's Primacy or World Order (1978), p.70 (endnote omitted):

...[B]oth [Kissinger's] failures and his successes in the business of preserving American primacy show an obsession with stability, which puts him far closer to Metternich than to his own criticism of the Austrian statesman.... Détente and the new triangular relationship were supposedly to allow the United States to worry more about the designs of its equals than about the tantrums of the pygmies.  And yet, even after Vietnam, the United States, in "destabilizing" Allende's Chile and in trying to help its friends in Angola, in submitting to South Korea's corruption and espionage in the United States and to Marcos's blackmail over our bases in the Philippines, in supporting the colonels in Greece, and in sustaining the Republic of South Africa (indeed in using it as a lever in Rhodesia, while proclaiming that it "cannot be regarded as an illegitimate government"), showed that the old equation of stability, anti-Communism and pro-Americanism had survived intact.  Metternich's excuse was the fragility of his country, its desperate dependence on the status quo outside.  Is the social and political order of the United States equally brittle and tied to conservatism everywhere?

[Comments as always are welcome, but before commenting please note, for the sake of context, when this passage was published.  And obviously it was written earlier than the publication date.]

A matter of terminology

Discussing the response of "relatively conservative Americans" to the American Revolution, Henry F. May wrote (in The Enlightenment in America [1976], p.96, endnote omitted):

Conservatives had many qualms, but there was no Thermidor, still less an aristocratic and legitimist reaction like that of Europe in 1815.  There had never been a base for real aristocracy.  The colonial bourgeois elite was not destroyed, only divided and weakened.  Moreover, American conservatives were not romantic reactionaries, but Whigs and moderates.

The last sentence of this passage would seem to contradict Corey Robin's argument in The Reactionary Mind (2011, pb. ed. 2013) that conservative and reactionary are basically interchangeable categories.  But perhaps the difference here is less substantive than terminological.  According to Corey R., the "priority of conservative political argument has been the maintenance of private regimes of power -- even at the cost of the strength and integrity of the state" (p.15; italics added).  It is subordination and hierarchy "in the family, the factory, and the field" (p.15) -- more than in the polity -- that conservatives have been concerned above all to defend.  So if the "conservatives" in America in the 1780s were primarily concerned with 'order' in the public realm, then perhaps, in the framework of The  Reactionary Mind, they were not conservatives at all, but merely traditionalists (see ibid., pp.22-23).

Another point might be that if conservatism in its recognizably modern form(s) arose in response to the French Revolution (ibid., p.43), then, perhaps, no responses to the American Revolution should be classified as conservative.  (And didn't Burke himself favor independence for the American colonies?)

P.s. (added later): May, p.99, discussing the Constitutional Convention: "Most of the opposition to the adoption of the completed plan [i.e. the Constitution] reflected no fundamental difference of ideology.... It seems to me doubtful whether the Constitution could have been either framed or adopted if the Convention [of 1787] had been held only a few years later, when the Moderate Enlightenment had been challenged by a new kind of revolutionary ideology and most moderates had become reactionaries."

Quote of the day

From S. Raghavan, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh (2013), pp.218-19 (notes omitted; italics added):

On 30 July 1971, a member of the [Bangladesh] Awami League showed up at the US consulate in Calcutta seeking an appointment for Kazi Zahirul Qaiyum, a national assembly member from the Awami League, to meet with the consul-general.  Instead, the consulate arranged for Qaiyum to see a political officer the following day.  Qaiyum said that he had come at the behest of Foreign Minister Khandakar Moshtaque Ahmad, who wished to reestablish the Awami League's contacts with the United States [with a view to the U.S. facilitating negotiations between Gen. Yahya Khan, ruler of Pakistan, and the Awami League].... The US embassy in Islamabad observed that even if Qaiyum's proposals represented those of the Bangladesh government, Yahya was unlikely to accept them.  In serving as a conduit for these messages, the United States risked upsetting its relations with Pakistan.  Nonetheless, in the interest of long-term relations with the Bangladesh leadership, the risk seemed worth running.  The White House had a rather different view.  Kissinger insisted that asking Yahya to parley with the Awami Leaguers in Calcutta was "like asking Abraham Lincoln to deal with Jefferson Davis."  Nixon agreed that "we can't ask Yayha to do that."  Yet, he asked the State Department to sound out Ambassador Farland [the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan] on this issue.     

To say that Kissinger's remark was an inapt analogy would be an understatement.

Quote of the day: Freud

I had remembered Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (orig. pub. 1930; Norton paperback, 1961, trans. and ed. J. Strachey) mainly for its emphasis on humans' (supposedly) innate aggressiveness and for its well-known thesis that 'civilization' is in conflict with 'instinct' and requires significant control of and renunciation of 'instinctual' behavior.  A recent glance at the text, which I hadn't read in decades, suggests that these rather grim themes are occasionally handled with a bit of what at least might pass for humor, as shown by this excerpt from a long footnote in chap. 4, pp.52-3:

Sex is a biological fact which, although it is of extraordinary importance in mental life, is hard to grasp psychologically.... The theory of bisexuality is still surrounded by many obscurities and we cannot but feel it as a serious impediment in psychoanalysis that it has not yet found any link with the theory of the instincts.... Another difficulty arises from the circumstance that there is so often associated with the erotic relationship, over and above its own sadistic components, a quota of plain inclination to aggression.  The love-object will not always view these complications with the degree of understanding and tolerance shown by the peasant woman who complained that her husband did not love her any more, since he had not beaten her for a week.

Politics and sex

"If politics is concerned with who gets what, or with the authoritative allocation of values, one may be pardoned for wondering why it need involve so much talk.  An individual or group can most directly get what it wants by taking it or by force and can get nothing directly by talk.  The obvious difficulty is the possibility of resistance, and it is counterforce that talk may circumvent.

"The employment of language to sanctify action is exactly what makes politics different from other methods of allocating values.  Through language a group can not only achieve an immediate result but also win the acquiescence of those whose lasting support is needed.  More than that, it is the talk and the response to it that measures political potency, not the amount of force that is exerted.  Force signals weakness in politics, as rape does in sex."

-- Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Univ. of Illinois Press, 1964, paperback 1967), p.114 (footnote omitted)

Quote of the day

"The rhetoric [of the Republican presidential candidates] is really out there. On foreign policy, this is the most-aggressive kind of stuff I've ever seen."
-- Richard Herrmann of Ohio State Univ., as quoted in this Aug. 2 article in The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch

Quote of the day

From Bernard Brodie, War and Politics (1973), p.5:

When General Maxwell Taylor admonished the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1966 that France had lost its Vietnam war not in Vietnam but in Paris, which he considered to be an important object lesson to the United States, the proper reply might well have been: "Of course; where else should they have made the appropriate decision?"  The French army, which is to say its professional officer corps, was outraged by its government's decision after Dien Bien Phu to liquidate the war, and these feelings were to accentuate the subsequent bitterness over Algeria.  However, Premier Pierre Mendes-France agreed with the common judgment that whatever benefits accrued to France from keeping Vietnam as a colonial dependency were in no sense worth the cost.... Significantly, Mendes-France remained under the Fifth Republic the most respected of the political figures of the preceding regime, an attitude shared even by so nationalistic and imperious a figure as Charles de Gaulle, who in fact followed his example under the more difficult circumstances of Algeria.