The Message

The FRENCH REVOLUTION at the end of the eighteenth century, the revolutionary tremors of 1848, the Paris Commune of 1871, and the ideological and temperamental explosion of the Sor­bonne in 1968 were important milestones not only in the history of France but in the annals of the West as a whole.

Indeed, these movements, each in its own way and in its own specific proportions, gave interna­tional expression to aspirations and doctrines some of which arose in France and others elsewhere, but all of which had germinated in that country with an altogether unique capacity to spread. The historical events thus generated in France encountered and put in motion, in the spirits of the various peoples of the West, aspirations, tendencies and ideologies whose rise marked their psychological, cultural, political and socio-economic development in the centuries that followed.

Similar effects are now being felt from the unbloody but no less profound "revolution, " with its own chain of causes and effects, set in motion by the victory of the Socialist Party in last year's May 10 elections and the consequent rise of Mitterrand to the Presidency. The crises affecting (in different degrees) communist and capitalist regimes are awakening all over the world tendencies and movements that boast of being especially modern and whose adherents believe that the clear, concise and victorious expression of everything, or nearly everything, they think and desire is in­herent in the self-managing socialism now ruling in Paris. Naturally, this sets them on the way to achieving, in their own countries, similar successes to the profit and joy of international com­munism, of which self-managing socialism is but a trainbearer and fellow traveler.