AIDS/Holocaust: Metaphor and French Universalism

AIDS/Holocaust: Metaphor and French Universalism David Caron IS AIDS A HOLOCAUST? The connection is a common trope in AIDS activism and testimonial literature, in which it takes various forms and serves different purposes. Needless to say, it is a fiercely contested analogy , especially in France where it was first used by the extreme right in the mid-1980s, and, for that reason, automatically became suspect. In the dominant humanist view, comparing AIDS to the Holocaust is still seen both as demeaning and excessive and as a departure from the collective norms of acceptability regulating political discourse—in short, as an allegory of the extreme right itself. But perhaps more than an offense to Jews and a shameless appropriation, the comparison is widely considered an unacceptable politicization of private matters, such as sexuality, illness, and death. As I will propose, metaphors have much to do with the division of public and private spheres, and what seems to be a historical and philosophical defense of the French republic 's universalist values in the face of neo-fascism actually hides a more diffused cultural anxiety. The larger question, then, is not whether some metaphors are "good" or "appropriate" while others are not, but rather how the status of metaphor in relation to truth and reason is a tool for social policing. So what exactly is so threatening to the republic in the AIDS-Holocaust metaphor? For many French gays and lesbians, the AIDS epidemic has entailed an increase in collective identification in a "universalist" nation, i.e., one that does not recognize the political legitimacy and historical specificity of minority communities as such. Yet, in the wake of the Holocaust and in direct relation to it, the Jewish community has progressively achieved a degree of legitimation that, while still contested, both externally and internally , used to be inconceivable in modem France. Can a gay community, in turn, go beyond the straight public's sympathy in times of hardship, and try to assert its specificity through the political recognition of a founding disaster? Can one community's achievement be of any use to another? If so, does that signal a break from the universalist tradition that has governed French culture since the Revolution and before? In what follows I will argue that, to some extent, it does. Holocaust metaphors in AIDS activist and testimonial discourses constitute rhetorical borrowings which, in addition to historical analogies , allow the gay community to produce a narrative of social and political Vol. XLV, No. 3 63 L'Esprit Créateur legitimation. As such, these borrowings necessarily question and redefine what we call republican universalism. The Jewish Community: From Emancipation to Extermination to Recognition On 27 September 1791, the Assemblée constituante proclaimed the emancipation of the Jews in accordance with the universalist principles of the French Revolution. At first denied in 1789, when Protestants and others were granted full civil rights, the emancipation was later curtailed by Napoleon, before being effectively and completely achieved in 1818 under Louis XVIII.1 The spirit of the emancipation, and that of the Revolution itself, is best encapsulated in the oft-quoted statement by the Count of Clermont-Tonnerre to the Assembly on 23 December 1789: As a nation, Jews must be denied everything, as individuals, they must be granted everything; they must only have our judges, theirs must not be acknowledged; legal protection must be denied to the so-called laws of their Judaic corporation; within the state, they must be neither a political body nor an order; they must be individual citizens.2 From the very start, the fate of Jews in modem France found itself linked to the universalist ideal of the Revolution and to its institutional embodiment, the republic. So how are we to explain the active role taken by the Vichy government in the Holocaust a century and a half later? Did it constitute a radical break with the republican tradition, or did it originate in it? For Pierre Birnbaum, as well as other historians of the period, anti-Semitism and its genocidal outcome found their source in what he calls "exclusionary tendencies" in French society, represented by segments of the political establishment of the republic who...