法国人的愤怒 Indignant? We should be
One night in March 1944, a young member of the French Resistance, codenamed “Greco”, landed in occupied France from England. His main mission was to connect Parisian résistants with London. He was betrayed to the Gestapo, who waterboarded him and sent him to Buchenwald. Just before he could be hanged, he swapped identities with a dead French prisoner. | 1944年3月的一个夜晚，“法国地下反抗军”(French Resistance)一名代号为“Greco”的年轻成员，从英国抵达被德军占领的法国。他的主要任务是负责巴黎抵抗运动分子与伦敦方面的联络。但他被 出卖给了盖世太保。他们对他施以水刑，并把他关进了布痕瓦尔德(Buchenwald)集中营。就在他被送上绞刑架前夕，他用一名死去的法国俘虏替换了自 己。 |
And now, aged 93, Stéphane Hessel tops France’s bestseller lists. His 12-page left-wing pamphlet Indignez-vous! (“Be Indignant!”) has sold 500,000 copies since October. His tiny publisher, with just two full-time employees, is overwhelmed. | 现如今，已93岁高龄的斯特凡纳•埃塞尔(Stéphane Hessel)荣登法国畅销书榜首。自去年10月以来，他那仅有12页的左翼小册子《愤怒吧！》(Indignez-vous!)已售出50万册。他的出版商——一家只有两名全职员工的袖珍公司已彻底供不应求。 |
The most obvious lesson is that people should write 12-page books. The traditional 250-page model probably stopped being appropriate with the disappearance of the attention span. But Hessel’s sales also reveal something about France, and about the left everywhere. | 这中间最显而易见的教训就是：写书只应写12页。随着人们注意力集中的时间越来越短，一本书有250页的传统模式可能已不再合适。但除此之外，埃塞尔作品的销量还揭示了有关法国及各国左翼群体的一些事情。 |
The first curious thing you discover after forking out €3 for “le Hessel”, and finishing it over a coffee, is that there’s nothing much new in it. As Hessel himself has admitted, his ideas aren’t very original “in themselves”. He just says what most left-wing people already believe. The growing gap between rich and poor makes him indignant. So does the suffering of Palestinians, of undocumented immigrants, and of our abused planet. Everyone else ought to get indignant too, and do something, though Hessel never quite says what. | 在你为这本小书掏了3欧元、并用一杯咖啡的功夫就看完后，最令你感到不解的会是，书中 几乎没什么新意。埃塞尔本人也承认，他的想法“本身”并不太新颖。他只是说出了大多数左翼人士的心中所想。贫富差距的逐渐扩大让他愤怒。巴勒斯坦人、非法 移民和满目疮痍的地球经历的苦难亦是如此。每个人都应感到愤怒，并去做些什么，尽管埃塞尔从未说清楚到底该做什么。 |
But then he doesn’t need to say much, because he is his own message. His biography gives Indignez-vous! its power. For a start, he can claim to be past the age of personal ambition. To quote his first words: “93 years old. It’s a little bit the very final stage. The end is not far.” Better yet, he never sought celebrity. In fact his German-Jewish mother was probably more famous: she inspired the female character in the love triangle in François Truffaut’s film Jules et Jim. | 不过，埃塞尔无须说太多，因为他本人已说明了一切。他的人生经历赋予《愤怒吧！》以力 量。埃塞尔可以宣称自己已过了有个人野心的年龄。该书的开篇写道：“93岁。可谓人生的最后阶段。死亡已不再遥远。”更重要的是，他从未追求过名誉。实际 上，他那日耳曼与犹太混血的母亲可能名气更大：她赋予了弗朗索瓦•特吕福(François Truffaut)灵感，塑造了影片《祖与占》(Jules et Jim)中陷入三角恋的女性角色。 |
But the crucial fact about Hessel is that he was a résistant. Without that, nobody would have bought this book. He claims to speak for the National Council of the Resistance, which in March 1944 wrote a programme for postwar France. He also speaks as one of the diplomats who drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for the United Nations in 1948. | 但最重要的一点是，埃塞尔是一名抵抗运动分子。若不是这一点，没有人会买这本书。他宣 称要为曾于1944年3月为战后法国制定规划的抵抗组织全国委员会(National Council of the Resistance)进行辩护。他还是1948年为联合国(UN)起草《世界人权宣言》(Universal Declaration of Human Rights)的外交官之一。 |
To Hessel, that declaration simply continued the ideals of the French Resistance. And those ideals, he says, still apply today. Fighting inequality now isn’t so different from fighting Hitler, he thinks. | 对于埃塞尔而言，上述宣言不过是延续了法国抵抗运动的理想。他表示，这些理想今天依然适用。在他看来，今天反对不平等的斗争与当初反对希特勒的斗争没太大区别。 |
In short, he makes an appeal brilliantly constructed to stir the contemporary Frenchwoman from her sofa, where she’s probably watching a reality TV show about mother-swapping. Having lived in France since 2002, I can testify that there’s always a lot of indignation about. People here always seem to loathe whomever they elected president. | 简言之，他用精妙的构思，呼吁当代法国女性从沙发上站起来，不要再看什么“交换妈妈”的真人秀节目。我自2002年以来一直住在法国，因此可以证明，这里总是充溢着大量怒气。法国民众似乎永远都会讨厌他们自己选出的总统，无论是谁。 |
This indignation is of course grounded in France’s two proudest traditions: the revolution of 1789 and the Resistance. Both have the same central story: indignant people rising against their own government. Their indignation is memorialised daily in schools, television programmes and the names of streets and airports. Indignation is almost the national obligation. Hessel merely tells the French what to be indignant about now. | 这种愤怒当然植根于法国最引以为傲的两个传统：1789年法国大革命和抵抗运动。两者的中心情节相同：愤怒的人们奋起反抗政府。学校、电视节目、街道和机场的名字每天都在纪念着他们的愤怒。愤怒几乎成了国民义务。埃塞尔不过是告诉法国人，现在应该对什么愤怒。 |
However, the book’s success resonates beyond France. Hessel is that rare phenomenon today: an acclaimed leftist. This should be the left’s global moment, but isn’t. We’ve had an economic crisis, bailouts for bankers, a botched war for oil, neglect of climate change and the relaxation of social mores. Nonetheless, the only left-of-centre leader of any Group of Seven industrialised nation is Barack Obama. Even he could probably only have been elected in the six-week window after George W. Bush capped his presidency by wrecking capitalism. Only in Brazil is the left triumphant. | 不过，该书在法国以外的地区也获得成功。作为一名受人拥戴的左翼分子，埃塞尔这种人在 当今实属罕见。这真该是值得左翼普天同庆的时刻，但事实并非如此。我们经历了一场经济危机、对银行家的纾困、恶劣的石油战争、对气候变化的漠视、和社会道 德的沦丧。尽管如此，七国集团(G7)中唯一称得上是温和派左翼领导人的只有巴拉克•奥巴马(Barack Obama)。就连他可能也只是在小布什(George W. Bush)因把资本主义搞砸了而下台后，才有机会在六周的窗口期内当选。左翼大获全胜的唯一国家是巴西。 |
Leftist parties have failed to voice the indignation that’s been brewing since 2008. They seldom manage to put together a good narrative – a dream, if you like. For instance, whereas American Democrats typically bang on about policies, Republicans tell a story about America. | 左翼党派未能表达出自2008年起就开始酝酿的怒火。他们很少能成功打造一种吸引人的叙事——或者可以说一个梦想。比如，美国民主党通常会喋喋不休地对政策指指点点，而共和党却会讲述有关美国的故事。 |
Like Obama in 2008, Hessel made himself the narrative. Both men presented themselves as individuals, not as products of leftist organisations: Obama famously hadn’t even been given a floor pass to the Democratic convention of 2000, while Hessel stood last year in an unelectable position for the small Europe Ecologie party. They both told a personal story about overcoming odds in patriotic language: they spoke not for the left but for all French or Americans, people with great traditions who deserved better than the current mess. | 与2008年的奥巴马一样，埃塞尔让自己成了故事本身。二人都以独立的个体身份出现， 而非左翼组织的代表：众所周知，2000年时奥巴马甚至还没有资格参加民主党全国代表大会，而埃塞尔去年也没有资格参选小型政党欧洲环保党 (Europe-Ecologie)。他们二人都用充满爱国主义情怀的言论，讲述了如何战胜困难的亲身经历：他们不是代表左翼说话，而是全体法国人或美国 人，拥有光荣传统的两国人民都理应得到更好的待遇，而不是被拖入当前这种混乱局面。 |
Neither man said much about policy. Each delivered the same simple message: “Yes we can,” or, in Hessel’s phrase, “my natural optimism, which wants that everything desirable is possible”. | 二人都对政策所言不多。每个人表达了同样简短的主旨：“是的，我们行”；或用埃塞尔的话说：“我与生俱来的乐观——希望一切理想都能实现”。 |
What Hessel desires now is that his friend Martine Aubry, leader of France’s Socialists, be elected president next year. But as a mere mortal and lifelong apparatchik born in 1950, she might struggle. Perhaps Hessel should run instead. | 埃塞尔现在的理想是，他的朋友、法国社会党(Socialists)领导人马蒂娜•奥布里(Martine Aubry)明年能当选法国总统。但1950年出生的奥布里只是个凡夫俗子，毕生都在做官，她可能胜算不大。也许，埃塞尔自己应该参选。 |
译者/何黎 |
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