The Pen and the Voice

In books, articles, speeches and interviews, the new President of the Fifth Republic has displayed a wide-ranging mind, a precise turn of phrase and a feel for the texture of life. Excerpts:

On the left: To deny that the earth turns, to close one's eyes to new sensibilities, to forget that each generation has its own needs, its style and its language was a very widespread attitude in the traditional milieux of the left. It is an attitude that irritated and worried me.

On the leftist demonstrators of May 1968: Leading the demonstrations were boys under 30 years of age who were imitating their elders of the Popular Front. The difference was that their elders knew all the words to the Internationale, not just the first couplet. It is always comic (or sad, as the case may be) to see so many young people affirm their personal!ties and free themselves from the society of adults by imitating adults.

On Americans: I like Americans, but not their politics. Under the Fourth Republic I was exasperated by the climate of obedience to their slightest wishes. I did not recognize their right to set themselves up as the gendarmes of the world.

On Henry Kissinger: His language is unconventional--what a pleasure in this cold and mechanical world! His style is like no one else's; Kissinger lives like Kissinger. Still, his Nobel Peace Prize bothers me. First of all it seems unfair. The prize should have been given to the Pentagon. Following the same line of thought, I suggest to the Nobel jury that it consider Uganda's Idi Amin, who has not shattered the skull of any of his ministers for at least a year.

On New York: When one asks me the cities I prefer, I put New York in the ranks of Venice, Ghent, Florence, Jerusalem. The first time I saw New York it was from the sky. How dazzling! I had flown there overnight, and the rising sun had not dissipated the mist of the early morning. Manhattan, gray and golden in its geometric relief, had a full softness. I have returned there five or six times. By plane I have always experienced the same shock, the same impression of entering the future through the window.

On Christianity: I was born a Christian and will doubtless die in the same state. But in the meantime, the Christian explanation is so rich in resonances. Still, I have an irreconcilable quarrel with the church's complicity throughout the centuries with an established order that I abhor. And I believe that the misfortune of our generation is to have forgotten the primacy of reason.

On being French: Let us speak of the forgotten man, abandoned, lost, delivered over to the powers that crush him. People in most places are dying of hunger, of misery and solitude; a whole people was killed in Cambodia, and another is being killed in Timor; the children of Uganda awake to the consciousness of the wretchedness of having been born; and the birds of prey--the world powers--are gnawing on the bones of 2,000 million human beings. Where would the established order be on two-thirds of this planet without the machine gun or the rope, torture or exile? It is on this scale that I measure the privilege of being French.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.