Nation Topics - World | The Nation

Marseilles, France

He came, he threatened, but he didn't conquer. The French Riviera will not be the first important region in Europe to be ruled by neofascists.

The miracle did not happen. Dynamics, as Lionel Jospin had hoped, did not defeat arithmetic. On his third try, Jacques Chirac made it. The Socialist interlude is over.

Paris

Those on the left who cherished the illusion that Poland would somehow vanish from the news and that Solidarity would disappear from our political consciousness have been disappointed.

In August 1980 the Gdansk shipyard workers astonished the world by winning the right to set up a genuinely independent labor union.

If Polish law supposes that a huge social movement can be voted out of existence, then, as Mr.

"What has happened to your 'socialist' France?
Is it going the way of all social-democratic
flesh?"

A film beginning with a shot of a little boy being beaten for not having learned the Declaration of the Rights of Man by heart, and closing in the overwhelming shadow of the guillotine, provides

The French socialist saga makes awkward reading for left-wingers. It has a wistful air of déjà vu.