Politics in Private

Love and Convictions in the French Political Consciousness

A. Muxel, Kenneth A. Loparo, Kenneth A. Loparo, Chantal Barry

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137395580
• eBook ISBN: 9781137395597
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Social Sciences

Have you ever fallen out with someone close to you over your political ideas or convictions or felt that a personal relationship was damaged because you disagreed about politics? There is no more interesting or diverse country than France to study how our political opinions influence the variety of relationships we engage in throughout our lifetimes. Using a unique approach, Anne Muxel offers a compelling account of the role our political opinions play in all our lives, whether those opinions are held strongly or not. She looks at the bonds between parents and children, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, friends and colleagues, crossing the full spectrum of human relationships to reveal a brilliantly complex portrait of how politics and the emotions intersect. This book is a must, not just for readers interested in France and in politics but also for all those interested in the complexity of human relationships.

PART I

Love and Politics

Mutual recognition is one of the first signs of love and perhaps even a necessary condition for it to be born. This is true for all kinds of bonds: filial, fraternal, romantic, and platonic. In all of these different types of bonds that shape personal and affective identity, there must be mutual recognition for an attachment—short or long term—to form and develop. Without it, even in the restrictive framework of familial relationships, love will not blossom.

This recognition does not always follow the same principles depending on the individuals involved. For some, it supposes similarity rather than difference. For others, it is nourished by otherness leaving room for difference, albeit accompanied by a risk of discordance or disagreement. The enigma of possible affinities remains and the attraction of individuals forming a small circle of intimates cannot be explained categorically or definitively. The paths toward this mutual recognition are complex and often fragile as the bonds can be weakened or indeed broken. Then there is the question of what one really recognizes in the other. This might be a part of oneself that is similar to the other (birds of a feather flock together). It might be another, who is very different to the self (opposites attract). And finally, what does this other recognize in the one who offers love? The chemistry is always mysterious, and even more so when it comes to physical, affective, and emotional bonds, together with all the range of demands made on the other once this mutual recognition has taken place.

Within the troubled waters of personal relationships where, over a lifetime, the bonds of love are created and broken many times over, what space should be given to political convictions, choices, and values? There may be a temptation, if not to minimize this space then to relativize it. And it might be supposed that few will see it as essential. However, I would like to show in this book that political conviction has an important role to play within any relationship based on feeling.

This is, first, because it has an impact on every individual’s deep and personal identity. These personal convictions mark each individual and belong only to him or her. They encompass the values through which the world outside is decoded and understood, and they have a tremendous hold on the heart and soul. Some people will risk their lives to defend them. This part of the self cannot therefore be completely absent from relationships based on feeling. However, in most cases it is neither asserted nor easily expressed. Making one’s political convictions explicit often causes as much embarrassment and reserve as showing oneself naked especially when the person addressed may not share them. Just like sex, politics occupies one of those “black holes” in speech described by Michel Foucault: “It is as if speech, far from being a transparent or neutral element in which sexuality is disarmed and politics pacified, becomes one of the places where both sexuality and politics exercise their formidable power without reserve.”¹ Talking about politics commits the individual to a certain line of thinking and offers public access to a range of personal opinions one might prefer to keep private. For example, because few people like to reveal how they voted in an election, this subject tends to be avoided. The confidentiality of the vote that cements a private political conviction that is nobody’s business but one’s own, offers proof of the fundamentally private nature of political opinion.

One of our survey respondents, Léa, a 21-year-old student recognized this: “You get close to someone when you can talk about love and politics.” In other words, you become close to a person you can tell everything to. A close relationship supposes a whole range of ways to “give of the self” allowing the bond to be created.² The list of these is wide open and varies according to each relationship and each personality involved in it. Political convictions can also find a place in this list. An individual who talks about their political convictions is also talking about themselves, about their beliefs and hopes. These are offered to the other and this is undoubtedly one way of defining intimacy. Foucault continues, “Speech is not only what manifests (or hides) desire, it is also the object of desire.”

Convictions not only engage a part of the self, they also have an impact on the relationship with others. To some extent, the choices they entail and the behavior that results from them are part of the broad orientations that prevail for society as a whole. Politics designates a space for exchange and otherness. Its most important function is the government of man, that in turn supposes the exercise of power, strategies of alliances and opposition, agreement as much as disagreement, and peace as much as war. Personal convictions cannot be divorced from collective interests.

The objection might be raised that not everybody is interested in politics. Half of the French population says they have no interest in politics and one-third says they never talk about politics. This is a fact. However, it all depends on how the word “politics” is understood. Many people engage in politics without realizing it. In a certain sense, many everyday concerns are connected to politics, such as discussing the price of a loaf of bread or violence in urban areas or the situation of illegal immigrants. Political opinions are more often expressed informally than within a repertoire of established practices. In one way or another, every individual has convictions that are important to them and a way of understanding the world that structures the conversations they engage in with others. In this sense, politics—albeit with varying degrees of politicization—is present in everyone’s life. The political positions an individual holds have an effect on personal relationships, given that the other may or may not agree with these positions. Because of this, politics has the power to bring people closer to each other or indeed to move them apart from each other.

Politics is full of individual and collective emotions without which it would have little reality and even less incarnation. This is true throughout history. Philippe Braud stresses the permanence of political feelings: “In politics, in the same way that economic and social factors are contingent, the emotional dimensions are largely trans-historical.”³ Politics supposes a level of emotional activity whose implications seem to be decisive in the understanding of a number of phenomena. People do not only behave rationally but also emotionally. Moreover, many specialists in political psychology consider that emotions provide the main explanation for political attitudes and behavior. For George E. Marcus, citizens are emotional beings and furthermore, it is on this level that they move toward some form of democratic ideal. This is because feelings allow the personal truth of this ideal to exist. “It is only by being passionate and rational that democratic citizens can give the best of themselves, because they then feel at the same time as they think.”⁴ Feelings are equally important as reason if not more so. Vilfredo Pareto criticizes the over importance granted to reason in explaining human behavior: “The fact that human beings are persuadable primarily when their feelings are addressed should not be overlooked.”⁵ According to Pareto, among human activities, the “non-logical type,” that includes political activity, depends on “emotional residues” that are inherent to the human condition. Feelings and ideas are deeply intertwined. Feelings also weigh on cultural determinism and social logics upon which political identities are shaped. The role played by emotions in social life or indeed in cognition itself is central.⁶

Like love, politics is characterized by fidelity and by betrayal, by passions and by break ups. Over time, the bonds these phenomena create either establish themselves or break. Love and politics have much in common.

Sometimes they are part of one and the same encounter. The number of politically active couples provides proof of that. However, the way in which love is expressed within a couple or within a friendship varies not only according to different periods of time or generations but also between men and women and according to different cultures. The same is true for politics, ideological reference points, and partisan cleavages, all of which have undergone a huge amount of change and transformation in recent times. Today, the bonds of feeling and affinity within a family, between a couple, or among friends are much freer of constraints and social conventions than they were in the past. They are more autonomous, more individualized, and decidedly less institutionalized.

However, both love and politics are characterized by passion—they are perhaps the only two domains where this is the case. In that sense, the emotions that underpin them are “transhistorical.” This is the common point that further strengthens the rational for comparing and questioning them together. The dream of love and the intensity of the desire to find it lead to powerful feelings that reason attempts to regulate. In politics, individuals adopt comparably strong positions, embrace causes, and become involved in power and power struggles. These features also provoke torrents of passions. The lively exchange between Winston Churchill who was prime minister at the time and a Labour MP in the House of Commons is indicative of how emotions spill over into political life. The MP in question remarked to Churchill that if she were his wife she would poison his coffee, to which he immediately replied “Madame, if I were your husband I would drink it!”⁷ In the France of today, political figures such as Nicolas Sarkozy arouse feelings whose intensity is incomprehensible without reference to passion.⁸

Statistically, little information is available in terms of an intimate sociology of love. We know about sexual practices. Thus, we know that men claim to have had more sexual partners than women, in general three times as many.⁹ The major stages of conjugal life, together with the characteristics of family life have not only been described but also decoded.¹⁰ We know more or less how to quantify the circle of loved ones: on average, a family is made up of around ten people, there are three romantic relationships in a lifetime, and most people have around three very close friends.

But what can be said about love and above all how can it be measured once one goes beyond the framework of particular relationships and affinities? Love remains private and particular. Even though since the beginning of time it has been written about and qualified by philosophers, poets, and novelists it remains obscure, eminently subjective, part of the individual’s entirely private life and therefore impenetrable. The only objective here is to draw up a sort of inventory of the ways in which it affects and can be affected by the weight of convictions in every individual’s life. It will thus become possible to provide the political equivalents of the different discourses on love as in a mirror image.

Politics at Home

Politics is present in many aspects of everyday life. Television is omnipresent and easily 75 percent of French people watch the news on a daily basis. Whether it be through current affairs programs, debates, election specials, talk shows, or political satire, it is easy for politics to invade the private life of families and couples thus providing opportunities for a variety of comments and reactions. These comments take various shapes: they might be approving, critical, sophisticated, politicized, or emotional. But the point is that it is hard to avoid the subject one way or another. Politicians themselves are well aware that they need to be part of this familial scene if they wish to succeed. Those who do not appear on television or who perform badly when they do, seem to have little or no chance of succeeding.

Although extensive media coverage isn’t enough to ensure positive results, it helps politicians to spread their message and allows individuals to confront their opinions with those of their friends and family. Even though it remains difficult to ascertain the influence of the media precisely, we do know that it increases politicization and, more generally, political socialization. Polemical positions and their expression through the art of political debate do not have to be part of the agenda. Real or supposed agreement, silence or indeed obvious indifference are also frequently part of exchanges between politicians and those they address. However, the omnipresence of the media makes politics more visible today in private life than previously and has also contributed to making it a more banal event. Mediatization has made the interpretation of politics more universal because it has become more globalized but also more private. According to Luc Ferry, politics is at the heart of social issues just as much as it is at the heart of personal issues finding a particular resonance within the familial framework. “Nowadays, in France, nobody is prepared to die for God, for the country or for the revolution. However, many people are prepared to take risks for their children or indeed for their friends. This is not because of any kind of withdrawal into the self but rather because of a greater disposition toward others. This is what makes us sympathise with a Kurdish father who has to emigrate to feed his family or a Jewish child during the war or someone who has been assaulted in the street.”¹ Private space does not entail a closing off from others. “Concrete” and “abstract” individuals have been reconciled and politics has taken root in a “humanist individualism” characterized by our democratic societies as described by François de Singly: “Morality and politics aim or should aim to ensure that all individuals can fulfil themselves as an individual person provided that this respects not only the humanity of other individuals but also the humanity that is part of the individual him or herself.”² In this sense, the framework of private life provides fertile terrain for the development of democracy.

For a long time, politics was considered to be an exclusively male domain. Debate and conversations on the subject took place between men to the exclusion of women. This continued to be the case in France long after women had obtained the right to vote in 1944. It was not until the 1970s that women began to vote separately from their husbands. Although remnants of this situation can still be found today, this is mostly among older people and the relationship of women to politics has of course evolved. Today, women are just as likely to vote as men are and often make the same type of political choices as men do, with the exception of the extreme right that they are less likely to vote for.³ They continue, however, to show a certain reserve toward politics and are less knowledgeable in the area than their male counterparts. They do discuss politics but a little less frequently and differently from the way men do.

The couple as a unit provides a privileged framework for the exchange of thoughts and ideas. Research shows that the spouse is the person with whom politics is most often discussed: 69 percent of French people say that they have frequent conversations on the subject within the privacy of their conjugal relationship.⁴ Men are more likely than women to start these discussions because they are generally more interested in politics: ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction   Politics through the Prism of Intimacy
• Part I   Love and Politics
• Part II   Figures of Agreement
• Part III   Figures of Disagreement
• Part IV   Politics and Personal Relationships
• Main Characteristics of Survey Respondents
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index