ABSTRACT
France is generally considered to be the ancestral home of the antagonism between Right and Left. The Left has such prestige in France that even the conservative and middle-of-the-road parties are at pains to disguise themselves with pseudonyms borrowed from the vocabulary of their enemies. The history of France since 1789 is characterised by the consistent inability of right-wing or left-wing coalitions to stick together and govern. The myth of a single unified Left is an imaginary compensation for the successive revolutionary failures from 1789 to 1848. In the rest of the world, the decisive event has been the dissociation between the political and the social values of the Left. The appearance of ideological chaos arises from the clash and the confusion between a strictly European schism and the dissociation of European values in societies outside the Western sphere of civilisation.
